Professor Julee Herdt’s Research and Innovations Guide the Future of Green Building Materials

Through her award-winning research and teaching at the University of Colorado (CU), Herdt developed a range of patented, high-performance sustainable building materials using 100% recycled waste fibers and trash. Herdt’s technology processes post-consumer paper, agriculture residues, bovine waste (manure fibers), hemp, forest wood wastes, aromatic flowers, and other unwanted biomass into structural insulated panels (“SIPs”), beams, interior partitions, furniture products, and more, without adding binders or toxic resins.

Called BioSIPs®, these products are fully renewable, repulpable, and recyclable into new materials. Carbon-negative buildings constructed from BioSIPs climate-positive and health-supportive products exceed energy-efficiency standards for reaching the highest environmental and construction ratings.

Everyday Materials for Sustainable Design

In 2002, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) introduced the Solar Decathlon Build Challenge. This biennial competition prepares future building professionals to plan for and construct high-performance, low-carbon buildings powered by renewable energy. Teams led by Herdt were the first overall winners of this prestigious prize in 2002 and 2005.

Through Herdt’s leadership, the first CU Solar Decathlon team emphasized sustainability as integral to their project, which was not an initial requirement for the competition. The CU team’s competition entry included biobased materials developed by Herdt and used assembly methods she applied in her own experimental bio-construction residence. The second Solar Decathlon project incorporated Herdt’s first generation “BioSIPs”, novel 3D core, which are structural insulated panels from recycled fiber wastes. These were incorporated with a range of new U.S.-made, construction materials incorporating soy, corn, sunflower, canola, coconut, and a multitude of other agro-waste and bio-sourced feedstocks. 

With the second Solar Decathlon as a full-scale testing ground, BioSIPs panels helped the CU team attain their next first-place win with a solar home that outperformed the international competition in energy efficiency, sustainable design, buildability, many other areas of real-time comparative analysis. Herdt received CU’s first-ever U.S. architecture patent for BioSIPs, as well as an additional software patent.

A full-scale BioSIPs solar home, tested in real-time against a series of standard and sustainable solar home designs, outperformed all others in energy efficiency, constructability, environmental standards, and occupant comfort. In the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM), BioSIPs surpassed standard SIPs in critical structural areas (axial and transverse loading), making them ideal for all types of construction and especially high seismic, wind, and snow situations.

BioSIPs and MycoSIPs

Building with BioSIPs offers solutions to toxic and environmentally damaging construction activities. A standard 2,400-square-foot U.S. home releases about four pounds of carbon dioxide-generating construction waste per square foot (psf) for 4.8 tons of toxic trash dumped in landfills per home. Building an equivalently-sized BioSIPs home diverts and transforms over 20 pounds psf, or 5.5 tons of trash, into valuable, environmentally-sound products that consume and sequester carbon pollution.

“The BioSIPs invention actually consumes society’s waste and diverts tons of trash into valuable products for safe, strong, and energy-efficient buildings,” Herdt said in response to the patent announcement in 2015. “There is great beauty and value in waste materials. It just takes the right processes and methods to find it, and with BioSIPs, we’ve invented and now patented these techniques.”

These insulated panels are made of alternative resources, including hemp wool, bio-laminated wood, and other novel materials. To reduce waste through the manufacturing of energy-efficient, affordable buildings, BioSIPs significantly help reduce a building’s carbon footprint.

Taking explorations of non-toxic building materials further, Herdt also patented MycoBioSIPs, which uses mushroom insulation structurally to naturally bond with the system’s 100% recycled biomass skins and cores. Because the system does not use petroleum, the entire MycoBioSIPs panel system is compostable and can serve as soil remediation at the end of a building’s use.

The Work Continues

In 2024, Herdt, along with Paul Meyer of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), completed a sustainable building materials grant-funded project with the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Army. The work brought together Herdt’s carbon-negative, 100% biomass waste fiber construction system and Meyer’s lignin-based adhesive invention for carbon-negative concrete (BUILD’EM/NREL). The project offers the Army novel materials to help achieve a 30% reduction in overall carbon and climate footprint in construction.

In addition to paving the way for greener futures in the built environment, Herdt is also shaping innovative and inventive futures for architecture students.

Students look forward to Herdt’s Green Tech design course each fall, in which they use “found” and repurposed materials to create truly unique furniture pieces. Her studios are also known for incorporating community and environmental needs expressed by external “clients” invited to participate in the studio assignment.

In 2023, students from Herdt’s spring 2022 Master of Architecture (M.Arch) studio, Olivia Collier (M.Arch 2022) and Maslin Mellick (M.Arch 2022), won the Colorado Green Building Guild (CGBG) Student Project of the Year. Their winning project was the result of an assignment to create a “Clean-Tech Manufacturing Facility for Sustainable Building Products.”

This semester, Herdt is teaching a graduate level Comprehensive Studio VI, the final graduate studio before CU architecture students enter the professional world.  In this course entitled “Preservation, Deconstruction & the Invention of New Architecture”, students are studying historical construction methods, craftsmanship, and classical tectonics as a framework for their sustainable architectural designs. Additionally, the students develop proposals and full-scale prototypes of their own technological inventions. The studio is a collaboration with City of Denver professionals and architects who are helping educate the students about building codes and the pragmatics of gaining approval to build to city regulations.

A Healing Home

In addition to teaching full-time at CU and serving as BioSIPs’ CEO, Herdt is collaborating with Ferguson-Pyatt Architects, an award-winning firm committed to building a better world through design innovation, to apply her new BioSIPs sustainable columns, beams, panels, and other materials in creating a “healing home” residence in Boulder. The Ferguson-Pyatt team includes three generations of CU students that Herdt has had in her courses and as Solar Decathlon team members.

As a case-study healing home, the BioSIPs residence will feature environmental and health-supporting materials and techniques for eliminating architectural triggers to the autoimmune diseases that Herdt has lived with throughout her life — Lupus, Sjogren’s, and Raynaud’s. Researchers will test the home to determine whether Herdt’s novel, green materials combined with off-the-shelf technologies can reduce or eliminate the auto-immune contributors that she and others struggle with to achieve disease stability and, hopefully, remission. In the home, the healing features will not be overt or obtrusive; rather, they’ll provide comfort and well-being to all who visit.

Herdt’s commitment to sustainable design continues to shape the future of architecture through her research, teaching, and industry collaborations. As environmental challenges grow, her contributions serve as a foundation for the next generation of architects dedicated to creating a more responsible built environment.