Posted on: Sunday, December 14, 2003

California company proud of straw house

By Steve Lawrence
Associated Press

COLUSA, Calif. — A pack of big bad wolves couldn't blow down the little straw house that Glenn Camp's company built in this small Northern California farming community.

The six-room structure was put together to demonstrate a technology that Camp figures can provide tough construction material for projects ranging from inexpensive housing to freeway soundwalls, while easing a serious air pollution problem.

The house's walls are composed of a double layer of 2-inch-thick panels that were made by exposing straw to high heat and pressure. Natural resins fused the straw into solid mats called strawboards.

The strawboards deaden sound, resist flames, aren't attractive to bugs and provide their own insulation, according to their admirers.

Coated with paper, strawboards look much like gypsum wallboard, only thicker. Hard pounding produces no sign of a dent.

"It's not quite bulletproof, but we can make a board that is pretty darn dense," said Camp, co-founder of Enviro Board Corp., a Sherman Oaks company that plans to tap the half-million acres of rice fields around Colusa to make strawboards.

The straw left over after the rice harvest is now usually plowed under or burned. The first process can encourage plant disease; the second coats the Sacramento Valley skies with lung-irritating smoke, although the state puts a 125,000-acre cap on the amount of straw that can be burned per year.

Straw has been used in construction for thousands of years. An early use was to mix it with mud to make plaster, then adobe bricks. Houses made with bales of straw have been around for at least 100 years.

A Swedish inventor, Theodor Dieden, developed a method of compressing straw into boards in 1935. Companies in Europe and Australia have made products similar to the ones that Camp and his colleagues plan to produce.

Strawboards have been used in thousands of homes as well as a variety of other buildings in Britain, Australia and other countries, but they've been slower to catch on in the United States.

Interest is growing, said Frank Coble, sales and marketing manager for Agriboard Industries, a small Texas company that uses wheat straw in its modular wall panels.

It's "catching on" as the quality of wood declines, the cost of traditional construction goes up and people become more aware that there are alternatives, he said.