Stop the Rockwool Greenwashing and Demand Climate Accountability!
Mahesh Ramanujam, President and CEO, US Green Building Council
Rockwool, a mineral wool insulation manufacturer, plans to build a heavily-polluting factory across the road from an elementary school in Jefferson County, WV. Rockwool has billed itself as a green building supplier, and its products are used in LEED-certified buildings.
The 156,000 tons of permitted air pollution include the following:
- toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde, benzene, and phenol,
- hazardous pollutants such as PM 2.5 which lodges in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, and heart causing chronic and fatal diseases, and
- greenhouse gas emissions from the approximately 90 tons of coal and 1.61 million cubic feet of fracked gas to be burned daily.
Jefferson County is in a highland valley with a delicate ecosystem. The air near the Rockwool factory is calm 30% of the year with wind speeds less than 3 knots and with frequent temperature inversions that trap pollutants close to the ground. Under these local weather conditions the nearby schools, businesses, and homes will experience the fallout of particulate matter and toxic pollution ranging from an average of 5 hours to an extreme 12-20 hours each and every day throughout the year. Water in Jefferson County flows through underground aquifers in a Karst geology. If pollutants contaminate the groundwater through precipitation, chemical leaks, or spills, then remediation would be extremely difficult and expensive, if not impossible. With 80% of our county on well water, we would suffer along with many other communities in West Virginia with undrinkable water for generations to come. The natural beauty of our rivers, forests, and ridges, our rich history with monuments, National Parks and Civil War battlefields, and our creative culture draw almost a billion dollars in annual tourism revenue, the most of any county in the state. Our economy is based on educational institutions, healthcare, agriculture, government services, technology, and light manufacturing. In the name of "economic development," our economy would be severely damaged by the kind of heavily polluting industry that has already decimated much of the Mountain State.
It is unconscionable that the US Green Building Council would provide LEED certification to buildings that include Rockwool products. "To increase demand for building materials and products that are extracted and manufactured within the region, thereby supporting the use of indigenous resources and reducing the environmental impacts resulting from transportation," the LEED rating system gives credits to buildings that use materials that are manufactured within 500 miles of the project site.
Read the White Paper on Rockwool Greenwashing
In the case of Rockwool's planned factory in Jefferson County, this creates a perverse incentive. Over 100 trucks each day will haul massive loads of coal and basalt rock through country roads to supply a factory emitting tons of pollutants and greenhouse gases into the Washington, DC metro airshed and watershed in the name of sustainability. The site of the plant was the closest to Mid Atlantic markets that is also within West Virginia, a state with notoriously lax environmental protections looking to create new markets for fossil fuels. The WV Department of Commerce is planning a 1,000-acre zone for heavy industry, with Rockwool as the anchor tenant. To achieve this end, the state has offered about $37,000,000 in incentives, which works out to be almost $250,000 per job for the 150 employees the factory will hire. The citizens of Jefferson County, WV are asking the world to join us in demanding that the USGBC take into account pollution and greenhouse gas emissions associated with production processes in LEED ratings. With our entire planet at risk from the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change, and many communities suffering from the health effects of toxic chemicals and small particulate matter, we can't afford the greenwashing perpetrated by companies such as Rockwool.
Please stand with us and communities around the world including Ontario, Mississippi, Croatia, Wales, and India already suffering from the harmful health impacts of pollution from Rockwool factories.
Help us stop a potentially devastating blow to Jefferson County, WV, the residents of the many cities and towns within the 35-mile high-impact zone of the planned Rockwool factory, the rivers and streams that flow into the Chesapeake Bay, and to the global climate and environment.
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To:
Mahesh Ramanujam, President and CEO, US Green Building Council
From:
[Your Name]
People around the world demand that the US Green Building Council end its support for greenwashing by effectively accounting for the environmental impact of the production processes associated with building materials. The LEED certification process is based primarily on the performance of the building, which is not an accurate representation of the true environmental impact.
We are called to this action by the plans of Rockwool, a multi-billion dollar international mineral wool insulation manufacturer, to construct a heavily polluting factory in the fragile ecosystem of Jefferson County, West Virginia. This project with potentially catastrophic health and environmental damage to the local communities was sited in the Washington, DC metropolitan area in order to serve the East Coast markets and potentially take LEED credits and approval for shipping distances under 500 miles to major markets in the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, Midwest, and Southeast US.
The location of the factory in West Virginia was made because of the State’s notoriously lax environmental standards and a State administration determined to create new markets for the consumption of coal and fracked gas by heavy industry.
The decision to build the Rockwool coal burning factory was made in spite of international commitments to transitioning energy generation away from fossil fuels to clean renewable resources as the cornerstone of our common effort to address the global climate emergency.
Insulation materials are rated on Resistance Value, or “R-Value,” a scale that measures their effectiveness to save energy by keeping heat inside or outside of a building. Rockwool’s mineral wool insulation has good R-Value, is fire rated and is not degraded or damaged by water or moisture.
The beneficial properties of mineral wool are greatly outweighed by the many disadvantages of the product which include the large amounts of energy needed to manufacture the insulation, the pollutants emitted from the factory during the manufacturing process and the harm to human health and the damage to the environment that process causes.
Additionally, mineral wool insulation is expensive. Because R-Value is a scale based on the amount of material used, the same insulating effects can be achieved at a lower cost with materials that have a lower R-Value than mineral wool.
Thankfully there are more cost-effective and more energy-efficient alternatives to mineral wool insulation that cause significantly less pollution, damage, and environmental degradation when the full “cradle-to-cradle” life-cycle is taken into account. Cellulose insulation, for example, costs less and has a higher R-Value than mineral wool. It is made from up to 85% recycled content, uses about 5 times less energy in production than is required for other insulation materials, is fire rated and acts as a fire barrier and is superior acoustically
This effort is part of the Escalation, a multi-pronged strategy of boycott, divestment, and direct action organized by Resist Rockwool, a West Virginia nonprofit, aimed at causing Rockwool to abandon its plans for a factory in Jefferson County, West Virginia. We plan to disrupt Rockwool’s relationships with suppliers, distributors, customers, investors, and government sponsors by exposing the destructive industrial practices and processes that will cause lasting harm to our regional environment, economy, and health while contributing to catastrophic climate change. We intend to cause sufficient pain and loss that Rockwool will act out of its own self-interest before it inflicts further pain and loss on our community.
Buildings affect our climate, accounting for almost 40% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. We ask you to stand with us, the residents of Jefferson County, West Virginia, our neighbors in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC, and the international community concerned with preventing catastrophic effects of environmental deterioration at the local and global level from toxic, hazardous and greenhouse gas emissions.
We need to fully and accurately determine the effectiveness of sustainable building practices and materials and ensure that only those products that meet the highest sustainable standards are specified and used in the building industry
We implore you to stand with us against Rockwool’s insidious greenwashing that tarnishes the very foundation of your organization.