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Green and sustainable materials for noise control in buildings

Conference Paper · September 2006

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 19th INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON ACOUSTICS
MADRID, 2-7 SEPTEMBER 2007

GREEN AND SUSTAINABLE MATERIALS FOR NOISE CONTROL IN

BUILDINGS

PACS: 43.55.Ev

Asdrubali, Francesco
University of Perugia, Industrial Engineering Department, Via Duranti, 67 – Perugia - Italy;
[email protected]

ABSTRACT
The energy consumption in the building sector can reach up to 40% of the total energy demand
of an industrial country. For this reason, green building strategies can be extremely effective as
far as fossil fuels savings and greenhouse gases reduction. Sustainable materials can play an
important role, since less energy is generally required for their production than the one needed
for conventional materials.
In the last years many new materials for noise control have been studied and developed as
alternatives to the traditional ones (glass or rock wool); these materials are either natural
(cotton, cellulose, hemp, wool, clay, etc) or made from recycled materials (rubber, plastic,
carpet, cork, etc.). Their importance is proven by the fact that in Europe many Municipalities
have introduced into Building Regulations specific recommendations to improve their use in new
constructions, allowing a reduction of construction taxes or other benefits.
The paper presents an updated survey of the characteristics and the acoustical properties of
sustainable materials for noise control and in particular sound absorption coefficient, airborne
and impact sound insulation data, as well as an analysis of the procedures to asses the
sustainability of these materials (LCA, Ecoinvent, Ecoprofiles).

INTRODUCTION
According to the definition of sustainability of the Brundtland Report [1], “Sustainable
development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs”. A product can be therefore considered sustainable if its
production enables the resources from which it was made to continue to be available for future
generations and has the lowest possible impact on human health and on the environment. A
sustainable product is generally made from natural or recycled materials and its production
requires a small amount of energy, makes a limited use of non-renewable resources and has a
low environmental impact.
Many currently used acoustic materials can not be considered sustainable, at least as far as
energy consumption and greenhouse gases emissions; moreover, some of them can be harmful
for human health. Mineral wools are widely used for thermal and sound insulation, because of
their good performance and low cost, but their fibres, when inhaled, can lay down in the lung
alveoli, and can cause skin irritation. Hence such materials must be adequately overlaid if
directly exposed to the air. Moreover they can pulverize and are not resistant to water, oil and
chemical agents and this can make their application not suitable for absorbing noise barriers.
In the last years a great attention has been focused on “green” materials, especially in the
building sector. Many research centres have developed new sustainable materials, in many
cases with interesting acoustical properties. Also the public sector started to consider these
materials; in Italy, for instance, many Municipalities have introduced into Building Regulations
specific recommendations to improve the use of ecological materials in new constructions,
allowing a reduction of construction taxes. These Regulations also contain a list of materials
that should be avoided (e.g. mineral fibres).
An increasing attention has been turned to natural fibres as alternatives to synthetic ones, in
order to combine high acoustic and thermal performance with a low impact on the environment
and human health. Natural fibres have very low toxicity and their production processes can
contribute to protect the environment. Recycled materials, such as recycled plastic fibres and
recycled rubber mats, can even be regarded as a sustainable alternative, as they contribute to
lower waste production and use of raw materials [2].
It is however very important to assess the “sustainability” of a natural or recycled material, and
to verify the total energy use in its production process.

SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT OF GREEN PRODUCTS

The correct approach to assess the real sustainability of a product is the so-called Life Cycle
Assessment (LCA), a procedure which analyses the potential impacts deriving from the entire
life history of a product (from cradle to grave). Material extraction, production, transport,
construction, operating and management, de-construction and disposal, recycling and reuse
have therefore to be taken into account.
For designers and decision-makers, LCA analysis results are available as “ecoprofiles”; among
these the most known are Ecoinvent, BRE Eco-profiles and Eco-indicator.
Ecoinvent [3] is a Swiss LCA database which takes into account various impact assessment
results: Cumulated Energy Demand, Non-Renewable Energy fraction, Global Warming Potential
and Acidification Power. A comparison based on the Ecoinvent database between the
environmental impacts of some traditional and natural sound insulation materials from cradle to
grave is shown in Table 1 [4]: cellulose, flax and sheep wool have the lowest impacts on the
considered categories.

Table I.-Ecoinvent. Comparison of environmental impacts of traditional and natural materials.

Non Renewable Global Warming Acidification
Density
Energy Potential Potential
(kg/m3)
(Mj/kg) (Kg CO2 eq.) (Kg SO2 eq.)
Natural Cautchuc 6.4 (kg/m2) 40 2.4 0.0086
Coconut fibres 50 42 0 0.0250
Flax fibres 25 4.4 0 0
Sheep wool 30 12.3 -0.3 0.0046
Cellulose flocks 35-70 4.2 0.2 0.0025
EPS 30 95 2.3 0.0201
Foamglass 130 67 3.7 0.0229
Glass fiber 34 43 2.1 0.0155
Mineral wool 50-60 17 1.2 0.0052

BRE Eco-Profiles (UK) [5] assign a score (in “eco-points”) to a product or a process by
weighting normalized impacts on climate change, acid deposition, eutrophication, eco-toxicity,
ozone depletion, mineral extraction, fossil fuel extraction, human toxicity, waste disposal,
transport pollution. The results for some insulation products, from cradle to their on site
installation, are: EPS (15 kg/m3) 0.028 pt., rock-wool (45 kg/m3) 0.020 pt., rock-wool (33 kg/m3)
0.016 pt., recycled newspaper cellulose 0.002 points.
Eco-indicator ’99 (NL) [6] supplies a final score by weighting various potential damages: to
human health, expressed as number of life years lost and lived with disability; to ecosystem
quality, expressed as the loss of species over a certain area in a certain time; to resources,
expressed as the surplus energy needed for future extractions of minerals and fossil fuels.
Two well-known labels concerning green products are Natureplus and Ecolabel.
Natureplus [7] is a label for high-quality building products, construction materials, and home
furnishings. Products that carry this label have been produced in an environmentally friendly
way, do not represent a health risk, and will perform their allotted functions trouble-free. The
Natureplus seal of quality is only awarded to products that comprise a proportion of at least 85
% renewable and/or mineral raw materials, according to the principle of sustainability; the
product must also carry a full declaration of all its input materials.
Finally, ECOLABEL, whose symbol is a "Flower", has become a European-wide symbol for
products, providing simple and accurate guidance to consumers [8]. All products bearing the
"Flower" have been checked by independent bodies for complying with strict ecological and
performance criteria; there are currently twenty-three different product groups, and already
more than 250 licences have been awarded for several hundred products, though currently no
sound or thermal insulating material has been awarded with ECOLABEL.

19th INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON ACOUSTICS – ICA2007MADRID

Many studies have been carried out to estimate the use of primary energy for the extraction,
transport, production and packing of different insulating materials. Not always a “green” material
requires less energy in its life cycle than a traditional one: flax, for example, requires
approximately 38 MJ/kg while rock wool 35 MJ/kg. However, synthetic plastic fibres (Expanded
Polystyrene, Polyuretan) always show the greatest impacts, especially as far as fossil fuel
consumption, with more than 100 MJ/kg.

GREEN AND SUSTAINABLE MATERIALS FOR NOISE CONTROL

As previously said, many new materials for noise control as alternatives to the traditional ones
have been proposed in recent years. These materials can be divided into two main categories:
- natural materials;
- recycled materials.
Recent Literature reports a wide variety of materials, from the most common [4], [9], [10] to the
less conventional solutions [11], [12]; some LCA studies are also available, showing that natural
fibres are cheaper, lighter and environmentally superior to glass fibres composites [13].
Sustainable materials are in many cases comparable to traditional ones as far as thermal and
acoustic performance. Though for many products physical properties have not been deeply
analyzed and are not yet certified, they have already reached a certain technical and
commercial maturity; in Italy, for example, many sustainable materials are listed in official prices
lists for public tenders.
There is a great variety of natural fibres proposed for thermal and acoustical applications; most
of them are commercially available such as coconut, kenaf, hemp, mineralized wood. As for
natural materials, the less treated they are, the higher they perform in energy saving; native
materials have to be preferred to reduce transport energy. It is well known that natural fibres
have negative impact as far as climate change due to CO2 absorption during the growth of the
plant. Nevertheless other performance have to be considered: vegetal fibres are more subject to
fungal and parasites attack and are less resistant to fire than mineral fibres. The non-toxicity of
the chemical products used for cultivation must be taken into account too.
Many recycled materials, such as waste rubber, metal shavings, plastic, textile agglomerates
can be used to prepare acoustic materials. It can be useful to mix various recycled materials of
different granulometries to obtain the desired performance; in these cases a binder or glue have
to be added in a proper proportion.

Sound absorption
Natural fibres are generally good absorbers. The extremely wide variety of natural fibres allows
to find a suitable material for almost every absorbing need. Many natural materials as kenaf,
flax, sisal, hemp, cork, sheep wool, bamboo or coconut fibres show good absorbing
performance and can therefore be used as sound absorbers in room acoustics and noise
barriers. Table 2 reports the coefficients of absorption as well as the values of Noise Reduction
Coefficient (NRC), for some conventional and sustainable materials. The NRC rating is an
average of how absorptive is a material at four frequencies (250, 500, 1000 and 2000 Hz) and is
here used for a comparison of the various materials.
In particular, bamboo [14] and sisal fibres [15] show an absorption coefficient at 1000 Hz and
more very close to the one of glass fibres (more than 0,90). Kenaf panels show an absorption
coefficient higher than 0.80 above 500 Hz [9]. Coconut fibres panels have an absorption peak of
about 0,80 at 1000 Hz [16], for flax panels the peak reaches 0,90 at 800 Hz while for sheep
wool panels the peak is 0,90 at 3000 Hz. Vegetable wastes such as grass, pine or gorse leaves,
corn cobs, used in sandwich panels, have an absorption coefficient similar to polyurethane foam
or mineral wool [17]. Reed matting has been recently proposed for absorption applications, with
excellent performance at medium-high frequencies [18]. Not all natural materials, of course,
have satisfying absorption performance: wood and cork, for example, due to their structure,
show poor absorption properties [19].
Among alternative materials from a mineral origin, expanded clay, expanded perlite, expanded
vermiculite, pumice can be quoted. Expanded clay shows good sound absorption performance
in a wide frequency range (higher than 0,80 in the range 500-5000 Hz) [20], though it requires
quite a high amount of energy for its production.
The recycled material mostly used to correct the sound environment in enclosed spaces is
cellulose obtained from used newspapers, added with flame retardants and biocides. Wet

19th INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON ACOUSTICS – ICA2007MADRID

 cellulose fibres are generally sprayed directly on walls or ceilings and their sound absorption
properties are even better than those of mineral wool: absorption coefficient is over 0,70 in a
significant frequency range (500-1000 Hz). Other promising materials are metal shavings and
textile agglomerates [21]. Rubber crumbs are good acoustic materials with a broadband
absorption spectrum and are particularly suitable for traffic noise barriers, also due to their
durability [22].

Table II.- acoustical properties (absorption) of some conventional and sustainable materials
Thickness Density Absorption coefficient (a)
N.R.C.
(mm) (kg/m3) 250 Hz 500 Hz 1000 Hz 2000 Hz
Glass wool 50 50.0 0.45 0.65 0.75 0.80 0.663
Rock wool 50 80.0 0.29 0.52 0.83 0.91 0.638
Polystyrene 50 28.0 0.22 0.42 0.78 0.65 0.518
Polyurethane 50 30.0 0.30 0.68 0.89 0.79 0.665
Polyethilene 50 32.0 0.25 1.00 0.40 0.70 0.588
Polyester 45 20.0 0.56 0.85 0.98 0.95 0.835
Hemp fibres 40 40.0 0.59 0.60 0.56 0.52 0.568
Kenaf fibres 50 50.0 0.48 0.74 0.91 0.86 0.748
Mineralized wood fibres 50 470.0 0.25 0.65 0.60 0.55 0.513
Flax 35 43.0 0.66 0.84 0.79 0.53 0.705
Coconut fibres 35 70.0 0.28 0.40 0.64 0.74 0.515
Reed grating 50 130.0 0.46 0.86 0.71 N.P. 0.676
Sheep wool 60 25.0 0.24 0.38 0.62 0.84 0.520
LECA 50 460.0 0.66 0.94 1.00 0.81 0.853
Cellulose 50 28.0 0.60 0.90 0.75 0.53 0.695
Rubber grains 5 1400.0 0.20 0.82 0.50 0.56 0.520

Cold extrusion processes have been recently proposed to obtain porous materials from recycled
carpet waste; the results show absorption coefficients very close to the ones of a standard
commercial glass wool [23]. Also Polyester fibrous materials, made from recycled plastic bottles
(PET), have been recently investigated [24].

Airborne sound insulation

Several natural materials are commonly used as thermal and acoustical insulation in multi-
layered walls: among these flax, coconut, cotton, sheep wool and kenaf mats are the most
present on the market [4]. Their sound and thermal insulation performance are in many cases
as good as those of traditional materials (Tables 3 and 4): many studies have demonstrated that
the sound insulation of double-leaf walls with low density animal wool (sheep wool) or heavy
vegetal wool (latex-coco) is equal or better than the one of walls with mineral wool or
polystyrene of the same thickness (about 69 dB in heavy double walls). Loose-fill cellulose
fibres and batts made of cellulose or flax fibres in timber frame walls showed the same airborne
insulation of glass wool [19]. Also mineralized wood panels with magnesite or Portland concrete
are used for sound insulation applications, as well as cork panels, with satisfying properties.
Dry loose cellulose fibres are already commonly used for thermal and acoustical insulation by
filling the cavities in walls and roofs, especially in the United States. When it is obtained from
recycled newspapers, it appears to match energy and raw materials savings and health issues.
As for the acoustical properties, they are as good as traditional material ones .

Impact sound insulation

This is probably the most common use for many natural materials (cork, coconut fibres, wood
wool) and also for many recycled materials. Resilient layers made of natural materials can be
very good for floating floors to increase impact sound insulation [25]: when the panels are
accurately designed and installed, their performances are as good as other traditional materials.
Recycled rubber layers made of waste tyres granules are an interesting alternative to traditional
materials, especially now that tyres are banned from landfills. Because of the large amount of
used tyres available worldwide, new applications have to be found and their use as impact
4

19th INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON ACOUSTICS – ICA2007MADRID

sound insulating layers is very promising [26]. Also recycled carpet wastes are interesting
materials as far as impact sound insulation, especially if made of a mixture of fibrous and
granular waste. The acoustic properties of these underlay materials compare favourably with
those of commercially available ones [27], [28] (Table 5).

Table III.- Rw (dB) of heavy double walls (each 7 cm of concrete) with different materials used
as insulation in the gap [4]
Polystyrene Polystyrene Mineral Sheep Latex-
Materials in the gap Air SE 30 PTSE 30 wool wool coco
70 kg/m3 70 kg/m3 70 kg/m3 26 kg/m3 735 kg/m3
4 cm insul.+ 2 cm
65 64 66 69 69 69
air
6 cm insul.. 64 62 63 67 68 68

Table IV.- Rw (dB) of lightweight double walls with different materials used as insulation in the
gap [4]
Glass wool, Flax, Cellulose, Cellulose,
Wall description batts, batts, batts, loose-fill,
15 kg/m3 35 kg/m3 25 kg/m3 50 kg/m3
1 board, single frame, 10 cm insul. 40 40 40 41
2 boards, single frame, 10 cm insul - 46 - 46
2 boards, single frame, 15 cm insul 62 60 - 62

Table V.- Index of reduction of impact noise of traditional and natural materials under concrete
slab; thickness = 20 mm
ΔLW (dB)
Kenaf (without slab) 37
Coco fiber 23
Sheep wool 18
Wood wool 21
Cork 17
Cellulose 22
Glass wool 31
Expanded polystyrene 30

Another proposed material is EVA (Ethylene-vinyl Acetate Copolymers) residues employed in

the manufacturing of shoes soles; thanks to its elastic properties, the performance is
comparable to traditional materials, with a reduced cost [29]. Finally, wood tailings and cork
shavings have been recently investigated, as well as natural wool; the main peculiarity of these
materials is the aptitude to keep acoustical performance nearly constant in time [30].

CONCLUSIONS
The interest in the acoustic performance of green and sustainable materials seems to be
increasing in technical and scientific Literature. Many related researches have been recently
published in International Journals and in the Proceedings of International Conferences; a
Structured Session on “Sustainable Materials for Noise Control, has been organized at
Euronoise 2006 in Tampere, Finland.
As a matter of fact, these materials show many advantages. They generally have a lower
environmental impact then conventional ones, though a proper analysis of their sustainability,
through Life Cycle Assessment procedures, has to be carried out. Also the total energy demand
is generally lower, but it has to be accurately evaluated, since not always an “ecological”
material requires less energy in its life cycle than a traditional one. Furthermore, many of these
materials are currently available on the market at competitive prices.
Acoustical sustainable materials, either natural or made from recycled materials, are quite often
a valid alternative to traditional synthetic materials. Airborne sound insulation of natural
materials such as flax or recycled cellulose fibres is similar to the one of rock or glass wool.
Many natural materials (bamboo, kenaf, sisal, coco fibres) show good sound absorbing
performance; cork or recycled rubber or polymers layers can be very effective for impact sound

19th INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON ACOUSTICS – ICA2007MADRID

 insulation. These materials also show good thermal insulation properties, are often light and
they are not harmful for human health.
There is however a need to complete their characterization, both from an experimental and a
theoretical point of view, and especially to propose a standard and unique procedure to
evaluate their actual sustainability.

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19th INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON ACOUSTICS – ICA2007MADRID

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