David Branccaccio

You can get lumber from sustainably farmed forests, and they press this wood into these laminations about as thick as my arm or as thick as my thigh, depending on what the structural needs are for these big panels.

And they're fabricated at a factory off-site.

And they ship these panels flat like an Ikea kit to your location.

And your house can get enclosed in sometimes just a week.

Now, you can't live in the house after a week.

It's not a total prefab.

On the outside, is it wood?

No.

Over the outside is mineral wool insulation.

which is a premium product that does not burn.

Over that, we're going to put stucco, which is kind of concrete.

So it's going to be really hard for a future fire to get through the walls and destroy absolutely everything.

So there's a dormitory.

at Colby College in the east, actually my hometown in Maine, where a European company called KLH is building that dorm out of these materials.

A company called Mercer is doing the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library in South Dakota out of the stuff.

And Megan actually went up to the factory in Spokane and took the tour about how they make this.

And here's Mercer's Nate Foster.

Schedules for building these things.

So it's particularly interesting for two reasons.

The affordability issue in America, you could get more houses up quickly with the stuff using a potentially sustainable technique.