Serious Materials is a Silicon Valley company that makes sustainable building materials.  Serious Materials’ new EcoRock drywall is one of the greenest building materials on the market.

The EcoRock manufacturing process requires 80% less energy than production of tradional gypsum drywall and results in substantially reduced carbon dioxide emissions.  These reductions are due to a streamlined process that omits the most energy-intensive steps such as calcining (dehydrating) and oven-drying the drywall material.

Serious Materials owns U.S. Patent Application Pub. No. 2008/0286609 (‘609 Application), which is directed to the EcoRock wallboard and manufacturing method. 

Gypsum wallboard generally consists of a hardened gypsum core sandwiched between two sheets of paper or other fibrous material.  A major ingredient of the core is calcium sulfate hemihydrate, commonly known as calcined gypsum or stucco.  The calcination step to harden the core requires energy intensive heating of the gypsum and produces large volumes of carbon dioxide.

Serious Materials’ new process allows wallboard to be made from non-calcined materials.  According to the ‘609 application, the EcoRock drywall core is made from a novel binder containing a metal silicate such as calcium silicate and an acid phosphate, together with certain fillers.  Liquids such as water or phosphoric acid are added to this “dry mix” to form a slurry. 

The key is that the combination of binder components creates an exothermic reaction that heats the slurry naturally, obviating the need for energy-intensive heating equipment.  This elegant solution may be the most significant innovation in a process that has been used, by some accounts, for over 100 years.

Indeed, the EcoRock drywall won the 2008 Popular Science “Best of What’s New” Award in the green tech innovation category.

An interesting note from the trademark side:  Serious Materials’ U.S. Trademark Application Serial No. 77/035,889 (ecorock_app.pdf) for ECOROCK for “drywall” sailed through the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (ecorock_allowance.pdf) with nary a peep from the examining attorney about being “merely descriptive” of sustainable building materials, despite the mark’s “ECO” component.  (see some previous posts on descriptiveness and ) 

The “ROCK” component and the plain vanilla goods description apparently won the day for Serious Materials’ mark.

When most of us think of green patents, it is technology such as fuel cells, solar panels and wind turbines that first comes to mind.  But there was an interesting article in IP Review Online about a study which found that patents directed to methods of carbon trading are also driving the green patent surge.

The study (which I could not find online) is called “Carbon Trading:  Patently Set for Growth” and, according to the article, identifies a link between funding from the World Bank Carbon Finance Unit and increased patent filings for business method patents relating to carbon trading tools and forms of carbon administration.

The report’s findings are particularly interesting coming now, when the patent law world is digesting a very significant decision regarding business method patents. 

In an en banc opinion decided on October 30, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (the court that hears all patent appeals from federal courts and the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO)) held that a process is patentable only if (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing.  (see the Patently-O discussion of the decision here)

The In re Bilski decision affirmed a PTO ruling that a claimed method of hedging risks in commodities trading does not satisfy the patentable subject matter requirements of section 101 of U.S. patent law.  Bilski’s claims did not pass the “machine or transformation” test because:

[T]he process as claimed encompasses the exchange of only options, which are simply legal rights to purchase some commodity at a given price in a given time period. The claim only refers to “transactions” involving the exchange of these legal rights at a “fixed rate corresponding to a risk position.” Thus, claim 1 does not involve the transformation of any physical object or substance, or an electronic signal representative of any physical object or substance.

Though business method patents are not dead – patent practitioners will undoubtedly find new ways to draft and argue them – the effects of In re Bilski will certainly be felt in the growing field of carbon trading.

In a previous post I wrote about CO2 Stats, a company that provides a carbon offset program for web sites.  The program calculates the carbon emissions of its subscribers’ sites and purchases renewable energy certificates to offset the emissions.

Enernetics, Inc., which owns CO2 Stats, filed a trademark application (485_app.pdf) in the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) last month for the word mark GREEN CERTIFIED SITE. 

U.S. Application Serial No. 77568485 (‘485 application) lists the goods/services as “[c]omputer certificates for verifying environmental services for Internet services and Internet devices, namely websites, email servers, e-commerce, multi-media, routers, and PCs.”

It seems likely that the PTO will at least initially reject CO2 Stats’ application as merely descriptive of the services provided, and the company will have to fight to get a registration.  This is because one can’t get a federal registration for a trademark if the mark merely describes the goods or services provided.

I subscribed to CO2 Stats and I’ve inserted the required piece of HTML code (although it seems I can only do so in a post so the above logo will not consistently appear on my web site).

Clicking on the Green Certified Site logo above verifies the offsets and provides an interesting window into the energy used and carbon emitted by the blog. 

For instance, the carbon footprint of you guys, my readers, this month is 0.0038 kg of CO2; the total server footprint is 0.0041 kg CO2.  There is also a cool pie chart showing the breakdown of the fuels powering this web site.

Thanks to CO2 Stats, Green Patent Blog will no longer contribute to global warming.