Transcriber: Emma Gon Reviewer: David DeRuwe
You probably don’t spend a lot of time
thinking about what the buildings we are in are made of,
but my grandmother does.
I call her Mémé Guitte, she’s 80 years old,
a woman, not the most imposing person,
but she’s also a farmer, she’s still a farmer,
and I will not say she had an easy life.
She’s living in a beautiful house,
very traditional in the region of Bresse in France with these red bricks.
This is also very cold in the winter.
Actually, I realized that when I spontaneously visited her,
and I realized that she’s only heating up
when one of her grandchildren comes and visits her.
For her, resources have to be treated with care.
Actually, I learned from her how to treat objects with respect
and think how to repair them to reuse them.
She often says, “Someone’s waste is another person’s treasure.”
So when we wanted to change the roof of her house,
we actually reused tiles and bricks from an abandoned house of her old aunt.
At the time, we also wanted to put insulation in the roof.
The goal for the insulation was to provide her comfort
and also allow her to save energy and cost,
when she wants to heat it up during the winter.
I remember when we were looking for the insulation material,
my uncle and I,
we wanted to have a material that is easy to install, safe, non-toxic.
For my grandmother, it has to be cheap and also fire-resistant.
Actually, when she was 12 years old, there was a fire in the house,
and she was very anxious that this could happen again.
At the end, we realized it’s not so easy to find
a product that fits all the requirements.
That's why we ended up using glass wool.
So glass wool, first of all, is not a fully fire-resistant material,
and then it’s not as cheap as my grandmother would have liked.
So you have some fibers inside
and that makes your skin quite itchy even days after,
but you also have a glue inside this material,
a plastic, resin glue that holds these fibers together,
and this makes this product difficult to recycle.
I remember that for my grandmother, it was difficult to realize
that this material could only be used once.
Alternatives to that would have been to use stone wools, plastics,
but these products are either flammable, toxic, or not very ecological.
So then, it was difficult to understand
that you could not find a widely available solution,
but we had to deal with it.
I realized actually during my studies
that the problem is much bigger than it seems.
In fact, 40% of the world energy consumption
and 1/3 of the greenhouse gases emissions come from buildings.
This is huge.
And this is mainly due by heating and cooling our buildings.
So here insulation is actually
one of the strongest factors to reduce these numbers.
There is a study saying
that we could reduce by 70% the buildings’ energy consumption,
if we were sufficiently insulating our buildings.
So when you realize that we are building
the equivalent of one New York every month,
you quickly realize that we will need a lot of insulation materials.
But with insulation materials, we have a problem.
Actually, these materials will take a lot of energy to be produced,
but they will also be very difficult to recycle.
That's why, for example, in Switzerland,
1.5% of insulation materials are recycled.
1.5% - this is nothing.
There is actually one big reason for this.
The materials that take a lot of energy to produce,
they also are very difficult to separate inside a building
because we have some glues,
we have some contaminants, and different families of materials,
and this is very difficult, at reasonable cost to recycle them.
Actually, these materials will be usually thrown
into a waste-recycling plant to produce electricity,
or worse, they will be landed in the landfill.
That’s why today, 35% of the world’s landfills,
are made up of construction waste.
So this is critical.
As humans, we have the tendency to solve first our short-term issues,
procrastinating the long term ones.
Here, we face a paradox -
we have a long-term issue becoming short-term.
So now this is the moment to think
how we can recycle these materials and to build them in a way
which does not destroy our bigger home, our planet.
So how can we design an insulation material that is safe,
that is non-toxic, while minimizing the environmental footprint?
This is what my team and I have been working for the last five years.
We wanted to create an insulation material that is meant to last,
but also to be torn in a way which does not harm anyone or damage anything.
For this, we wanted to use local materials that are widely available.
So we use two of the most abundant materials we have on the planet -
rocks and air.
We don’t need specific rocks,
we actually use the rocks that result from digging a hole
on the construction site when you want to build a house.
So not the most valuable materials at a first glance.
We take the finest parts of the stones,
and we create foams with a lot of air inside.
So imagine, we basically bake the stones with some water like a cheese souffle,
and at the end, we can have a foam with 99% of air inside.
In the 1% left, we have our treasure:
the waste and some minerals that we developed.
At the end, we have insulation panels.
They will insulate very similarly to standard materials
thanks to the air that is entrapped inside.
They will also be fully fire-resistant.
We are dealing with a stone here,
and you can imagine they will be quite cheap.
But what is very interesting here is that you will need a very low -
they need a very low energy
and they will result in a low carbon footprint during their production,
because you use local materials,
because you have low-energy processes involved,
so at the end of life,
you can take the foam, you can crush it, and you can make a new foam again.
Cherry on the cake, you can also recycle this material
along with the other materials in the facade of a building, for example,
with the concrete, with the bricks,
because all the materials come from the same family,
they are all stones.
You don’t need these plastic glues anymore.
This process can be transposed to different types of waste,
depending on the region where you are.
For example, you can work with ashes from different industries.
You can work with concrete waste, tile waste.
This gives this different color to the foam.
So this is an opportunity to rethink construction
by putting attention on what can be used locally
and how to treat a building at the end of life.
With this approach, we have the opportunity
to work locally with local materials.
This will help businesses against shortage of resources and unstable price,
and it will also allow to minimize the transport of the material.
With this approach, the recycling rates of insulation materials
can ramp up from 1.5% to 40% in the next 30 years being realistic.
So we wanted to find a solution for my Mémé, for my grandmother
that is safe, cheap, performing, and sustainable.
Today a solution exists.
It is our duty to make it widely available for the future generations
and to provide them the comfort that I wish my Mémé had.
Thank you.
(Applause)