For years and years, I worked on the annealing of cellular glass to avoid breakage and producing foamed glass gravel is totally the opposite. But since 15 months, I daily watch the production of gravel and the product started to become very interesting to me. Indeed, in floor insulation is vapor tightness not an issue and the much more expensive horizontal boards are not necessary. Foamed glass gravel is also a durable solution for floor insulation and a nice method to use waste glass which became difficult to reuse as bottles or flat glass. On top of that, the waste glass can be foamed with healthy foaming agents, used in any house man or wife. The product does not absorb water, is 100% ecological and healthy and has a very long life time, compared to EPS and XPS. The last property is much more important under the floor (impossible to replace) than on a roof. Many companies are producing this material, which became rather cheap due to the market competition.

GLAPOR® is the only company, who is producing gravel and boards and has developed the best of two worlds. Indeed, in the GLAPOR® solution, the gravel is enclosed between walls, built from GLAPOR® cellular glass boards. In this way, rain water, falling aside the house, can not flow into the gravel, which is protected by the boards. In this way, the system has a perfect frost protection and other advantages. A schematic drawing and picture explain the above. The GLAPOR® mantra   “Fascination by glass bubbles” is well applied in this case.

Today, the gravel is sold at about 40€/m³ and the cellular glass boards at 150€/m³, making this system really competitive with the classic EPS and XPS solutions.

Gravel between upstanding boards

Actual building site with gravel between boards