Building with environmentally-friendly materials
Building while paying attention to the environment: how can you do that? Fortunately, working with sustainable building materials is becoming more and more common for a growing amount of people. Nowadays, there are quite a lot natural and eco-friendly building materials available on the market. One of them is the sustainable exterior cladding of Rockpanel, made from the natural material basalt.
First of all, it’s good to take the definition of sustainable facade materials into account. The term is currently used for multiple concepts. Sometimes, when talking about sustainable building materials, environmentally-friendly building materials (also known as green building materials) are meant. These are materials that fit into an eco-friendly building approach. Examples are green roofs or sedum roofs (click here), but also materials of a natural origin.
Another aspect of building sustainably is the life span of a construction and the materials being used. For example, if you use a natural building material that was produced environmentally-friendly, but that eventually only has a short life span, then that probably isn’t the best choice. By considering both the impact on the environment of a product and the costs during the entire lifetime (TCO or Total Cost of Ownership), you’ll get a good overall picture of how environmentally-friendly products are.
Do you want to make your building as sustainable as possible? Then it’s important to look beyond the building phase and the origin of your building materials. Look at wood, for example. It is known as a natural building material that’s also sustainable. However, the impact on the environment of wood can be immense when the wood is from a forest area that isn’t managed sustainably.
In addition, Fire Safety plays a major part. Wood still is a combustible material, even when treated with (often non-eco-friendly) fire retardants. By opting for a non-combustible alternative, such as Rockpanel Woods, you’re building in a future-proof way too!
Is Rockpanel a sustainable choice! Definitely! It all starts with the raw material from which all our façade panels are made: basalt. This volcanic rock basalt is both readily available and sustainable – the earth creates more basalt each year than we are using. A responsible choice, for now and the future.
Of course, an efficient and responsible manufacturing process is also important. Did you know that we are able to produce more than 400 m² Rockpanel boards from only 1 m³ of basalt? Production waste is also fully utilised, and up to 50 % of our raw material content are recycled materials.
All Rockpanel facade board have an officially confirmed lifetime of 50 years. And after that, they are nearly fully recyclable and can be used to produce new stone wool products without any loss of quality. Rockpanel is also used in many zero emission buildings.
Not yet completely convinced? Or are you not sure which of our 200+ colours and designs would be the best fit for your design? Feel free to request a free product sample and experience Rockpanel yourself.
We manufacture board material mostly used in ventilated constructions, for facade cladding, roof detailing, soffits and fascias.
