In a former tobacco factory in the Granville County town of Oxford, Huade Tan and Nathan Silvernail believe they can change the way homes are built.
While many companies supply home panels sourced from trees, their startup Plantd harvests a 20-foot-tall perennial grass — the exact type its founders declined to reveal. The company then disassembles this hard grass into very strong fibers, dries it, mixes it, rolls it out and finally cuts it into sheets of 1.20 by 2.5 meters.
Earlier this month, Plantd signed an agreement with the country’s largest construction company, DR Horton, to supply 10 million panels, roughly enough to build 90,000 homes. It is by far the largest order to date for the three-year-old company.
“It doesn’t change the way you live,” Silvernail said, referring to the tan panels that look and feel like wood made from trees.
According to the CEOs, the advantage of grass is speed. The most popular tree for lumber production in North Carolina is loblolly pine, which loggers grow for about 15 years before cutting them down. Grass takes only a few years to mature and can then be harvested once or even twice a year in North Carolina’s temperature climate.
“We don’t think you can just do business and continue the cycle,” Tan said. “It’s as if we’re rethinking the entire supply chain of an entire industry.”
Silvernail and Tan met in California as colleagues at Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX. “We were miserable,” Silvernail acknowledged.
During coffee breaks, they discussed carbon sequestration, the process of removing carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere and storing it as a liquid or solid. The two wanted to convert CO2 into something useful, and housing materials seemed to have a clear social benefit. Tan first left SpaceX and moved to the North Carolina Triangle with his family. Silvernail followed a few years later.
Tan and Silvernail founded Plantd in May 2021, along with a third co-founder, Josh Dorfman. They set up a factory in Durham and spent their first year identifying the best alternative building material. Grasses such as switchgrass, miscanthus and bamboo were tested, but all lacked the desired scalability, sturdiness and carbon-sequestering performance.
They say they eventually came across an ideal candidate.
Tobacco farmers sell on grass
Last year, Plantd moved its headquarters 30 miles north to Oxford, a city of 9,000 near the Virginia border. A mural advertising Natural American Spirit cigarettes still covers a wall of the converted Reynolds American facility, which closed in 2022. It is a history that Plantd wants to capitalize on by convincing farmers around the traditional tobacco hub to produce the particularly tall and hard grass.
It wasn’t an easy pitch; Some North Carolina farmers have been soured on the push to produce industrial hemp in recent years. But Plantd has two contracts, including one with 2020 Farmers Cooperative, a nonprofit that works with historically underserved farmers in nine states. In August, Plantd announced the goal of growing 550 hectares of grass through the cooperative next year.
“The economic downturn of the tobacco sector has left a vacuum of what there is to do in the region,” Tan said. “We consider that an inefficiency. There is land. There is infrastructure. We came to live there. From there we started to grow.”
Plantd estimates that one hectare of grass can produce as many panels as 52 trees. The grass is sterile and to clone it the company has opened a tissue culture facility at its headquarters in Oxford.
The company has 120 employees. In addition to its main location, it owns a research and development farm in Roxboro, facilities in the city of Stovall in Granville County, and an out-of-state raw materials plant.
It has raised $20 million so far and is looking for more money from investors and government grants. In addition to panels, Plantd also develops housing beams and headers. In the long term, it wants to create the complete framing package for single-family homes, multi-family homes and commercial properties. But DR Horton’s order alone will take the startup several years to fulfill.
DR Horton has already used Plantd materials in a model home in the Fletcher Mill development in East Durham. The company now wants to build 90,000 more.
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