Feb 5 2009
New green building materials are currently on display at the 2009 NextGen Home in Las Vegas.
Almost everyone that walks into the new 2009 state of the art NextGen Home Experience in Las Vegas says, "Wow, what's that finish on the walls," and they go up to it and touch it. The new material is called PlasterMax-IND™ by GigaCrete Inc., a leader in green building materials technologies. NextGen Home is a newly built eco friendly house built with many new technologies with an emphasis on sustainability and energy efficiencies now open during several prime expos such as World Of Concrete, International Builders Show and Consumer Electronics show. GigaCrete's LEED-qualified interior wall finish added LEED points to the project with its recycled material content. The coating called PlasterMax-IND™ is 200 percent more resistant to abrasion than ordinary concrete and about ten times more than commercial high abuse resistant gypsum wall boards, developing compressive strengths between 8,000 psi and 10,000 psi. Typical concrete is about 2500 psi.
Applied over ordinary gypsum wall board, PlasterMax-IND™ forms a dense and strong skin coat that imparts high abrasion and indent resistance to the ordinary gypsum wall board.
Gypsum board is quite fragile and easily damaged and repairing damage to wall boards can be costly and time consuming. At long last, wall boards can now be coated with a great-looking plaster-type finish that is extremely difficult to gouge, dent or scratch. Schools, colleges, hotels, casinos, military facilities, hospitals, restaurants, jails, public buildings or any place with wall surfaces prone to abusive treatment, are ideal candidates for environmentally friendly PlasterMax-IND™.
GigaCrete Inc. has also developed PlasterMax-ICF™, another new green building material, and installed it at the 2009 NextGen Home — an eco friendly house built mostly from Nudura ICF. GigaCrete's PlasterMax-ICF™ is the World's first fire-rated abuse resistant coating for expanded polystyrene foam (EPS). EPS is used to make insulating-concrete-form (ICF) construction, and ICF builders have had little choice but to use gypsum wall board as the fire-rated finish over EPS foam. Not only is gypsum wall board fragile, it also supports growth of mold and mildew under moist conditions. In damp or flood-prone areas, this can be a serious problem and known health risk. GigaCrete products, on the other hand, are harder than concrete and will not support mold-and mildew. Instead of wall board, the ICF industry can now apply durable PlasterMax-ICF™ that is fire rated and its finish coat hardens to more than 8,000 psi. PlasterMax-ICF Base coat is applied directly over EPS foam without mesh unlike its competitors, topped with PlasterMax finish coat that can be finished to look like Venetian plaster.