Strawboard: Replacing Burning with Housing

Every year, globally, we sequester the entire world's transport emissions in the byproducts of five crops: wheat and cereal straw, rice straw, sugarcane bagasse, corn stover and coconut husks[1]. Most of it gets burned in the field. Meanwhile we've lost roughly one third of the world's forests, half of that in the last century, yet the industry keeps specifying timber as though there were no alternative[2].

Compressed strawboard is not a laboratory curiosity. The technology has been in commercial production for decades. A single line processes around 15,000 tonnes of rice straw a year and can lock up roughly 25,000 tonnes of CO2e in the process, enough panel for about 4,000 homes. It carries a 60-minute fire rating, no VOCs, and it costs less per square metre than rendered blockwork.

South East Asia is where this can have impact at scale. Indonesia burns enormous volumes of rice straw every harvest, and it is building fast. Put a factory somewhere near the rice paddies, with a radius of decentralised baling machines and night-time delivery trucks to the factory, and you solve two problems with one machine: the smoke that shortens lives across the region, and the demand for cheap, non-toxic, fire-resistant wall systems. No export required. The product gets used where it is made.

References

[1] King, B. and Magwood, C. (2022) Build Beyond Zero: New Ideas for Carbon-Smart Architecture. Washington, DC: Island Press.

[2] Ritchie, H. and Roser, M. (2021) 'The world has lost one-third of its forests, but an end to deforestation is possible', Our World in Data. Available at: https://ourworldindata.org/world-lost-one-third-forests

World Health Organization (2024) Ambient (outdoor) air pollution, Fact sheets. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-(outdoor)-air-quality-and-health

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2024) FAOSTAT: Burning – Crop Residues. Available at: https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/GB