Algae - Based Sustainable Building Materials

Flora Materials proposes to continue developing a novel algae-based flooring product that will be highly durable, easy to install, and sourced and manufactured in the United States. The intended final product would mimic the durability and easy installation features that drive the popularity of current Luxury Vinyl Tile (LVT) while lowering greenhouse gas emissions with a novel algae bio-base solution. This product could be used in Army installations that would traditionally use a vinyl flooring product to directly help the Army achieve the 50% greenhouse gas reduction goals detailed in the ArmyÆs Climate Strategy Implementation Plan by 2032 over a 2005 baseline.Ā Existing LVT flooring products are prolifically used as a building material due to many desirable qualities such as cost, ease of installation, easy to maintain and clean, waterproof and durability. LVT comes with heavy environmental downsides that come from using polyvinyl chloride plastic (PVC), a material derived from fossil fuels, resulting in significant energy consumption and CO2 gas emission. Flora MaterialsÆ end product aims to create a US- Sourced flooring product derived from algae that has both the environmental advantages as well as the durability and ease of install required to support the building needs of the US Army.Ā This Phase II effort will build on the Phase I work that explored algae-based material compositions and manufacturing methods as well as be a part of a larger effort by Flora Materials to create a suite of algae-based building materials. The Phase II work proposed here will focus on getting a flooring prototype to a large scale manufactured product. The project team will finalize the productÆs architecture and composition and create algae-material prototypes that optimize for the product's core tenets of sustainability, durability, US-sourced and easy install. The team will perform robust material and manufacturing testing, and deliver functional units through verified manufacturing at scale that will be capable of meeting the construction and sustainability requirements of the US Army. The end goal of this Phase II effort will be to demonstrate the application and large-scale manufacturability of this algae-based flooring product through installation into an Additional Dwelling Unit (ADU) building project at the conclusion of this project.