Brandon company making green building technology

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A Brandon-based company has developed a technology that is helping new buildings go green from Tuktoyaktuk to the Bahamas.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/08/2019 (1672 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Brandon-based company has developed a technology that is helping new buildings go green from Tuktoyaktuk to the Bahamas.

Greenstone Structural Solutions is based out of the east end, where it operates a plant on the same lot as contractors Excel-7.

The company manufactures a proprietary type of panel used to construct building envelopes — the part of a building that separates the environment inside from the environment outside. In other words, the outer shell.

Colin Slark/The Brandon Sun
Ed Dornn and Tilda Fortier of Greenstone Structural Solutions show off their plant in Brandon's east end.
Colin Slark/The Brandon Sun Ed Dornn and Tilda Fortier of Greenstone Structural Solutions show off their plant in Brandon's east end.

Typically, building envelopes are made with wood and ubiquitous pink insulation. At Greenstone, they make envelopes from steel and polystyrene put together with a glue that owner and president Ed Dornn calls his “secret sauce.”

Dornn first got the idea for the company five years ago and has been delivering products with his daughter, Tilda Fortier, as company president. They’ve been delivering products for the last three years.

According to Dornn, wood doesn’t have a strong resistance to temperature and also lets in moisture, which reduces the lifespan of a building when mould sets in. It also takes more energy to heat these buildings, because the heat can escape.

The idea for the panels came from a chemist in Virginia, who Dornn said had a good idea but a product that wasn’t very friendly for builders.

“I bought into the potential, but I took it and changed it dramatically,” said Dornn.

Part of Dornn’s motivation to develop the product also came from a desire to be more environmentally friendly.

“One of the things I observed was the fact that we weren’t really being, as builders, as careful as we could with our building envelopes,” said Dornn.

The panels made by Greenstone are better at resisting the moisture and temperature outdoors, which significantly reduces the cost of heating.

It also makes it possible for buildings built with Greenstone panels to be more easily heated using passive energies such as wind, solar and geothermal that don’t have as much potential energy as fossil fuels.

Further, they said the lifetime of their panels is 200 years, compared to approximately 80 years for buildings made with organic materials. The panels also don’t off-gas after assembly.

While the cost of Greenstone’s products is approximately 25 per cent more than traditional products, they assert that the difference will be more than made up by the energy savings.

Since starting, the company has worked on improving the technology and has the manufacturing process down pat at its plant.

Bags of extremely tiny polystyrene pellets are fed into a machine that puffs them up and makes them larger. Then, steel that has been rolled into a specific shape is pressed together with pellets and glued to form a solid bond as panels.

A building project sends plans to Greenstone and the company builds the panels to fit a design. There are some variations in the panels. If they’re being used to make a basement, the panels are made thicker to withstand the soil load.

Those panels are then delivered to a building project to be assembled. Dornn likens it to a Lego kit or Ikea product.

“But much larger pieces than Ikea,” Fortier added.

Everything from a small shack to four-storey buildings have been made with Greenstone panels. The first time a contractor uses their products, Greenstone sends a representative to certify them and make sure they know how to handle the materials.

Buildings have been made with Greenstone panels in Westman, but also in northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and North Carolina.

As more jurisdictions make building requirements more stringent as part of the effort to be energy efficient, Dornn said the company is poised to meet the demand for greener homes and offices.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @ColinSlark

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