Matt Risinger recently posted a video on his blog about Green Building where he talks about his implementation of QuietRock in a residential home. The homeowners were concerned about potential noise coming from the wall that was shared with the master bedroom and hallway bathroom, slated for use by their children, and between the laundry room and kitchen. On his drywall contractor’s recommendation, Matt used sound-reducing 5/8 inch QuietRock on both those walls.

Check out Matt’s blog and YouTube channel. He consistently shares his green building experiences and material choices in a way that is really helpful to other custom home builders, architects, and homeowners.

You might wonder what creating quieter rooms has to do with green building, but there are a few reasons quiet and sustainability go hand-in-hand:

• In this homeowner’s case, using one 5/8 inch piece of drywall is equivalent (acoustically) to using 6 sheets of regular gypsum drywall. The third largest greenhouse gas producer in building materials is the manufacturing of gypsum drywall, a process that was invented more than 100 years ago. The ability to do more with less means less materials, less waste, less energy, less embodied energy.
• One of the best moves a person can make to have a major impact on the environment is to purchase a condo or townhome in an urban setting. If everyone in the US lived in this way, we could cut carbon emissions by 1B metric tons or more. That is about what Italy and the UK generate as a whole combined. But today, the number one complaint of occupants is noise. And it is this noise that keeps people from moving into urban environments.

There are many cost-effective ways to reduce noise on the market today that create high STC values, especially in multi-family dwellings. It’s up to us to innovate and build sustainable environments that people want to move into, without sacrifice in comfort or privacy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under QuietRock. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.