Partner in the spotlight: Eurabo
The Exploded View features a lot of innovative materials and techniques. For insulation techniques, Eurabo, among others, stands in. The Ronse-based company started out as a planing mill, but has since grown into a wholesaler of ecological building, wood and insulation materials for professionals and consumers.
"The Exploded View inspires and motivates visitors," says Dries Hubrechts, the person in charge of procurement and consultancy at Eurabo. "We too want to contribute our 'tree' to change the linear way of building to circular building systems with bio-based materials."
Demand rises
More and more people are finding their way to bio-based building materials, Dries knows: "Fortunately, the supply is growing particularly fast. For instance, several producers have significantly expanded their production capacity, such as Steico, a producer of wood wool insulation. There are also more and more new players. Gramitherm, for example, which produces grass wool insulation."
And that is necessary: "Only dry building systems with renewable materials have a sufficiently low environmental impact and will be sufficiently available - and therefore affordable - in the future. The insulation technique we demonstrate in The Exploded View consists of glass foam granules and is applied directly to open ground. That insulation is made of recycled glass, has a high load-bearing capacity and is particularly inert. This makes either the foundation strip or the concrete slab unnecessary."
"Cement production accounts for 8 per cent of global CO2 emissions, so using less concrete is very important. Moreover, the loose aggregates are circular: in the future, we can simply dig them up and reuse them as floor insulation in another project."
Sharing knowledge
To guarantee the sustainability of its products, Eurabo screens all materials in advance for their ecological and technical added value. In addition, the company shares its knowledge with its customers: this way it can ensure that the products are correctly applied and installed.
This thorough cooperation between the various building partners is very important to achieve efficient building systems and smooth implementation, says Dries. "Both private individuals and contractors can come to us for insulation advice, training, technical designs and assembly plans ... With our beam processing centre Robot Drive, we also offer our customers a turnkey construction kit."