March 25, 2015

Is the Foam Evil?

In our regular quest to root out the most negative and inaccurate information on SPF, we found another doozy that we’d like to highlight for you. This website by 475 is a blog posting by a presenter at a recent 2015 NESEA Building Energy 15 Conference in the Northeast. Clearly biased and misleading, it presents one-sided information and even compares use of SPF inexplicably to radiation treatments, elsewhere attempting to align SPF with tobacco and the "sick joke" of clean coal. And, while the site focuses its ire on SPF, it makes so many references to other types of "foam" alluding to the idea that all of the criticisms, failures, fires, dangers and other information is about SPF, when in fact it is not. All in the "style of our founding fathers"? There’s just so much wrong with this site that there is nowhere to begin or end making corrections. We simply present to you as misinfo-tainment.

"Is Foam Evil?" was the initial title of a panel discussion I participated in at NESEA’s Building Energy 15 Conference – before it was renamed "Tiny Bubbles" (see Green Building Advisor’s highlights toward the end of this article). Here at 475 High Performance Building Supply, we are famously anti-foam, with particular emphasis given to closed cell spray polyurethane foam (ccSPF). In our blog series Foam Fails, we’ve taken an extended look at the problems of foam insulation. We’ve even written A Declaration of Independence from Foam Plastic Insulation, that in the style of our Founding Fathers, makes the case against foam and the companies that push it. Each day we are reminded of the performance problems of foam, whether it’s another building burning, or another failed blower door test.