Insulation and its Impact

In residential and commercial buildings, energy efficiency through insulation is the simplest and most cost effective way to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.¹

By reducing energy consumption, it is estimated that insulation cuts pollution from the utility infrastructure, slashing carbon dioxide emission by 780 million tons globally every year. This is the equivalent to the annual electricity use of over 90 million homes. Knauf Insulation’s goal is to provide products and services that conserve energy and preserve natural resources for a sustainable future.

In the average life of a building insulation saves over 1500 times the energy used in its manufacture.

^{1 “A Cost Curve for Green House Gas Reduction,” The McKinsey Quarterly 2007, Number 1.}

Click here to learn how insulation can affect your energy consumption and help reduce operating costs of buildings and homes. For the good of the world we need to be making less impact on our planet and demanding better building materials.  Knauf Insulation is answering that call with our line of ECOSE Technology products.

Our Commitment to Sustainability

Our Guiding Principles

As a family-owned company, we’re proud of the Knauf Insulation name and what it stands for. Customers worldwide have put their trust in the quality, consistency and performance of our products and our business values. So, everyone who does business with us recognizes the importance that, in our quest to become more sustainable, there are certain principles that we will not compromise:

• The quality, consistency, and performance characteristics for which our products are known.
• Our ability to apply technological advances across all product lines.
• The safe and efficient manufacture of our products.
• Our goal of reducing emissions from plant operations.
• Our commitment to cost-effectively produce our products.

Driven by our mission and these principles, we are proud to produce fiber glass insulation with ECOSE® Technology. ECOSE Technology is a revolutionary, more sustainable binder technology born from five years of intensive research and development. ECOSE Technology features rapidly renewable bio-based materials rather than non-renewable petroleum-based chemicals such as phenol, formaldehyde and acrylics commonly used in traditional fiber glass insulation products.

Our entire line of building insulation is verified to be formaldehyde free by the strict standards of the GREENGUARD institute. By reducing the binder embodied energy associated with these petroleum-based chemicals, up to 70% compared to our traditional fiber glass insulation binder, ECOSE Technology reduces both the expected Global Warming Potential and total embodied energy of Knauf Insulation products by approximately 4%.

Manufacturing improvements

• In our operations, we look for ways to advance our glass formulations to increase the use of post-consumer recycled bottle glass in all our products.
• To reclaim and reuse vented heat and to control emissions, we have invested millions of dollars in regenerative thermal oxidizers (RTOs) and the best available control technology (BACT) for pollution control.
• By converting our products to ECOSE Technology, we have eliminated chemicals like phenol and formaldehyde from the manufacturing process, eliminating their plant emissions. This has an additional benefit of reducing cost instability associated with those chemicals.

Achieving LEED Gold as we help others do the same

Our new 24,860 square foot Engineering and Development office building earned a New Construction Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED-NC) Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council and uses 30% less energy than a conventional office building.

A sustainable, impact and legacy

All our products are made from renewable and abundant resources, such as recycled glass and sand. And we’re proud to be putting glass bottles back to work rather than into landfills. Our products are made with a minimum of 45% post-consumer recycled glass—about 26 million bottles each month, all collected at curbside. Our insulation products have an inherent impact on energy consumption as they save hundreds of times more energy in use than is required to manufacture them.

Through the development of revolutionary solutions like ECOSE Technology, we continually focus our efforts on providing solutions that reduce energy consumption and save resources to positively affect the lives of people today and tomorrow.