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, coconut husks. Most of it gets burned in the field. Meanwhile we've cleared roughly three quarters of the world's forests in a century and keep specifying timber as though there were no alternative.
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 argument stops being theoretical. Indonesia burns enormous volumes of rice straw every harvest, and it is building fast. Put a factory next to the paddy 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.
The obstacle has never been the chemistry. It is that nobody has built the first plant.
WHO, Ambient Air Pollution fact sheet
FAOSTAT crop residue data, Indonesia
Durra Panel Environmental Product Declaration (Ortech Industries)
RMIT, Durability and fire resistance of compressed wheat-straw panels