From wool to hemp, sustainable building materials are a growing business in the Mountain West

A Havelock Wool employee trims excess material from insulation panels made of sheep wool at the company’s facility in Reno, Nev. On a recent Wednesday afternoon inside a 67,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Reno, Nevada, a large machine was moving a fluffy, off-white material through a series of drum rollers. The substance was being layered into thick panels of insulation made from a material not often found inside walls in homes: wool. “Hot, cold, warm, dry – wool does it all,” said Andrew Legge, founder and managing partner of Havelock Wool. Havelock Wool insulation made of sheep wool lines the walls of a house located on Gray’s Crossing Golf Course in Truckee, Calif. The company makes insulation products entirely out of sheep wool. Legge started the company in response to the lack of healthy and sustainable choices in the insulation industry. “As an insulator, we’d like to say that evolution has occurred in nature’s R&D department – not in some lab creating a synthetic fiber that is from the onset just not going to perform as well,” said Legge. According to the Environmental Working Group, an environmental health advocacy nonprofit, commonly used materials like fiberglass and spray foam may contain […]

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