• Log In
• Search

BioBased Soy Insulation

The Garden Home Retreat is a demonstration site to test and teach lessons in eco-friendly design, sustainable living and good stewardship. My goal is to capture your imagination with the beautiful setting and then inspire you to try out some of my ideas in your home and garden.

Some of the basic materials used in the construction of the Garden Home Retreat are vital to its overall energy efficiency. For instance, the cottage at the Retreat is about to be insulated. While I don't often discuss insulation at cocktail parties, the more I learn about the role in saving money and improving the comfort of the house, the more I find myself bringing it up.

Now there are a lot of different types of insulation available these days, but after doing my homework, I decided to use a product called BioBased Insulation. It is a soy-based polyurethane spray-in-place foam insulation. This innovative product has excellent thermal and sound insulating properties that can help to create a healthy, comfortable, energy efficient, and durable residential or commercial structure. It's made from an annually renewable resource, soy beans, and is a wonderful replacement for petroleum based products.

As part of my research into BioBased insulation I visited their facilities in Northwest Arkansas and met with Mike Muccio the COO of BioBased Insulation. Here's how our conversation went.

Allen: Why is this such an outstanding product?

Mike: Well for a lot of reasons. Spray foam insulation is literally growing across the US and the reason why is it creates an air tight barrier around your home or structure. What that allows you to do is make it healthier, more comfortable, more energy efficient and more durable. And with our product we replace some of the petroleum with bio-base polyals that makes it more environmentally replausable.

Allen: Now this foam insulation process has been around for a while, but so much of what we see is strictly petroleum based.

Mike: Right and one of our key driving initiatives is to continually increase the bio content of our product and continue to innovate and make it more environmentally friendly both from the environmental components that go into the product as well as how we are using it in structures.

Allen: Of course I love the way this stuff goes on, but I have to say it is the green and sustainable component of it that really gets me excited.

Mike: Absolutely. That is really an amazing thing. What we are looking to do is create sustainable environments and that goes not only for what we are putting inside of the insulation, but what it is doing for the life of the structure. This insulation is creating homes and buildings that are healthier, more environmentally responsible and more energy efficient. They are better places to live and work.

Allen: What is amazing to me is that you are taking soy beans, a sustainable crop, and you are producing insulation and other foam products with it.

Mike: Absolutely and we are looking at all polyurethane products from shoe soles to carpet backing to foam cushions for furniture. There are so many polyurethane foams out there and with our technology we can go in and make those foams more environmentally friendly by taking out some of the petroleum and replacing it with this soy bean product.

Allen: Currently polyurethane is petroleum based.

Mike: Historically polyurethanes have been petroleum based. We are looking at each industry and seeing how we can integrate this new, innovated technology. We have had great success; spray foam being one of the first categories we have gone after.

When you look at what we are doing by trying to increase the bio content and reduce the petroleum in our products it is a sustainable system that we think is the right way to operate and think it is the way we need to operate.

Allen: Applying the insulation is such an amazing process to watch.

Mike: It really is neat isn't it?

Allen: It is sprayed on and then we see the insulation grow off of the wall.

Mike: Yes and it is it cures in seconds becoming quite hard.

Allen: Help me understand how effective this is as an insulator.

Mike: Well this has a very high R value about a 5.5 per inch, but the real value in a spray foam is that is seals and envelops your home like an igloo cooler. What that allows you to do is to down size your HVAC unit. This makes your home very energy efficient and very healthy because you can now control all of the air flow into your home.

Allen: I can see this is a very efficient process, but is there any problem with the house becoming too tight?

Mike: Well common building science today is to build a house as tight as you can get it and then ventilate it right. So you need to make sure you size your mechanicals appropriately for spray foam insulation because it does seal the home up very tight.

Allen: So it seems like it would make sense, if you are considering this product, to work in conjunction with your HVAC contractor to make sure proper ventilation is in place.

Mike: Absolutely it is a real marriage between those two components to get the end product that is going to create the most sustainable, healthy and comfortable home.

Allen: Speaking of HVAC systems, what about spraying on duct work?

Mike:This is a great product to insulate duct work, which allows you to keep that air conditioned before it dumps out into your living space.

Allen: So this stuff is green, good for the environment, its sustainable, its healthy, it makes my house operate more efficiently what is the bottom line in the dollars you spend and how you save money?

Mike: That is a great question. When you look at spray foam insulation it may cost you $10 to $20 more on your mortgage for a 2000 sq. ft. house, but it can save you $40 to $50 a month on your utility bills. So when you look at it from a cash flow perspective you can't afford not to use this.

Allen: Well I guess that's true, especially when you think about fuel prices and how they just continue to escalate.

Mike: Well said. When you look at systems and you look at what we are doing by taking a product which is historically petroleum based and using things from the earth that are renewable and integrating them into a system that replaces that petroleum you create

By taking a renewable resource like soy beans and using them to create a product that is historically petroleum based we are helping to create a system of sustainability and I think that bodes well for our future.

Good to Know: Benefits of BioBased Insulation