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The drywall revolution

One of the problems with green building, and with renovations and rehabs in general, is that you produce a lot of waste, and you have to be dedicated to extracting the re-usable bits to do anything with it. (The horrible pile of crap left over from the American Legion demolition is an example.)

Of course, if you build it for deconstruction, it gets a lot easier. That's what companies like Herman Miller do--their "Design for environment" commitment includes disassembly as a major part of the process. We tend to think of buildings a little different, though. We tend to think about building to last, even though we know it won't--at some point, everything will get replaced or built over. That's not go-go capitalist creative destruction, that's how buildings learn.

And so it tickles me pink to find the answer to your drywalling needs: how to install drywall in a way that it can be removed later for reuse. (Drywall is a weird thing, in that technically, it's basically just gypsum, which is calcium, which is a good soil additive, so you can break it up and compost it, except that if it's painted or wallpapered, you probably can't separate it out to use without keeping all that toxic stuff on it. Dunno if something like milk paint overcomes this problem.)

The solution is called Green Zip Tape. For a normal drywall installation, you screw the drywall to studs, then plaster over it with joint compound, usually two or three layers. This tape, though, serves as the first layer--it goes over the screws at seams, and then you put the joint compound over it. You leave a tab exposed at the top or bottom (covered by trimwork, of course). When the house is being renovated or demolished, you can pull the tab of tape left over--that pulls up the tape, as well as the top layers of joint compound, leaving you easy access to the screws underneath. Unscrew it, and presto--you have a basically intact sheet of drywall, ready for its next use.

As an aside, one of the things I like about this is that it seems very classic in its trickery, through the use of trim to cover up the seems. My own uninformed sense is that a lot of fashion (in clothes) was historically about hiding seams and joins--flys are designed to cover buttons or zippers, ties and vests cover buttons on shirts, that sort of thing. This seems to fit into that tradition well by using trim not as decoration, but as a tool for layered concealment.

The downside, of course, is that it doesn't seem to be commercially available yet.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on September 21, 2007 7:28 AM.

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