A huge share of the gypsum used in drywall is *synthetic gypsum* — a byproduct of flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) at coal-fired power plants. When SO₂ is scrubbed from exhaust using limestone, the reaction produces calcium sulfate dihydrate, chemically identical to mined gypsum. In the US, FGD gypsum has accounted for roughly half of all gypsum consumed by the wallboard industry at its peak.
The "cheap, uniform, and free of defects" story is partly a story about coal. The drywall industry scaled on the back of an abundant, nearly free waste stream from the energy sector. It's a classic example of industrial symbiosis — one industry's pollution abatement becomes another's feedstock.
And it cuts the other way now: as coal plants shut down across Europe and North America, synthetic gypsum supply is shrinking. The drywall industry is facing a real raw material squeeze, with manufacturers having to shift back toward mined gypsum or find alternative sources. There's ongoing work on using phosphogypsum (from fertilizer production) but that comes with its own radioactivity concerns.
For someone in your position this is particularly relevant — the "wonder" of drywall is entangled with the fossil fuel economy in a way that makes earth-based construction methods look increasingly attractive as that supply chain unwinds.
Picture rails are a kitschy and twee feature that few people today even know their purpose, but anyone who tells you that they’re just as good for hanging things on are committing perjury
In my humble opinion, they are significantly better than pounding a nail into drywall. Of course, I also have an absurdly large collection of framed photographs and other art, all of varying sizes, and I love swapping frames around throughout my home. Having picture rails throughout my house means I don't have to keep pounding holes in the wall every time I replace that 20x20" photograph of my toddler shot in a square aspect ratio with a 16x20 shot on my 4x5, or whatever.
Many people only think of picture rail as what you find in old Victorian homes, but modern picture rail can be much less obtrusive and lightweight. I have a lot of framed art as well. When I finally bought a house I installed STAS minirail throughout. The "wires" are transparent Perlon filament, and anything you hang can instantly be adjusted vertically and horizontally.
This is way better than arguing with partner about the proper height, making a destructive hole, then having to cover/patch when opinions or artwork change. My walls are not drywall, so that was a big factor, but the freedom to arrange/rearrange is a major benefit.
And the author completely misses the point thinking it's somehow mandatory in plaster walls, when it's just a convenience thing that avoids making holes in the plaster…
Interesting to me that no mention of the use of drywall (in various forms) to act as a substrate for actual plaster. This seems common in the UK from what I understand from my family back there, and it is also common in the USA in high end residential construction. It is particular common in Santa Fe where I live now (for high end anyway) because the so-called "diamond plaster" look & feel is very popular. So, you still build with stick frames (or in a few cases, cinder block), cover that with drywall/sheetrock, then plaster it.
yeah, my parents' US home (which was originally my grandmother's) in the eastern half of the US has plaster-on-drywall construction.
it is a bitch and a half for hanging anything (just like plaster on lath), plus it screws up wifi.
Pro tip for finding a stud, if you have access to the bare floor -- stick a drywalling knife / spatula under the bottom trim and poke. you can find the studs that way, and then measure off since 16" is pretty common. Measuring off the edge of an electrical box can work too, but you have to figure out what side of the stud the box is on...
It is indeed how it's done in the UK. It's a bit of a cliché for British people to complain about American houses, but it's not that we don't have stud walls ourselves, it's just that we don't just go and paint directly on top of plasterboard. Both walls and ceilings are skimmed, with either plaster or shudder Artex. We also have dot and dab walls which are built from block, have a layer of plasterboard glued, leaving a ~6mm cavity, then skimmed with plaster.
> It’s impossible to mount even lightweight items such as picture frames onto the wall, because even the tiniest hole from nails or the like would crumble and erode into dust.
The trick for this is to just find the stud. Same thing you'd have to do in drywall. For light stuff like photos, you can get away with putting a nail right into the lathe without having to find a stud. If you miss the lathe (you can tell) just move the nail up a half inch.
I think this misses the beauty of a plaster wall. Level 5 drywall has nothing on a skilled artisan with plaster, and yeah you can’t hang things through it but it also lasts hundreds of years. My walls are 120 years old and robust, the kids haven’t damaged them and they’ve more than held up.
You can hang things through it just as easy as drywall too. Light stuff just put it right into the lathe. Heavy stuff, with both types of walls you are going to want to anchor into a stud.
I will never understand why we fill our walls with mechanical and electrical infrastructure and then wrap them in a paper and plaster, which then needs to be torn, broken, and repaired in order to maintain said infrastructure.
Pipes will fail. Wires will fail. Ducts will fail. Maybe not in 5 years, but over the span of 20, they will. Why make them so frustratingly inaccessible?
Drywall is trivial to remove and repair, I have no issue cutting walls with a circular saw or vibrating cutter to get access then patching it.
I have seen another method for making walls that were accessible though, from a homesteader/ hand tool woodworker and carpenter. His walls were 24” thick with huge areas for piping and electrical and had 4x4’ removable wood panels.
I wouldn't call it trivial. First you have to determine where to cut it; if you cut the wrong area you have to cut again. All the steps in repairing it either take time, are messy, or require some skill, and the time adds up (e.g. waiting for the patch to dry before you can sand; waiting for the primer to dry before you can paint; etc.).
And then you have to match the surrounding paint, which is all but impossible since even if you have the same color, the original will have likely faded over the years, making your newly applied coat a mismatch, so now you have to paint the entire wall (no fun when it's a big wall). And if you had wallpaper instead of paint, good luck to you unless you saved some extra scraps.
All in all, an access panel would make the job much simpler.
The thing is you might not need to access your electric or plumbing for like 100 years. You do get a panel where access is presumably on a more regular schedule: usually the shower hookups are accessible from a closet.
I watched a video recently, which I can't find, where an architect set up a beautiful wooden baseboard around the entirety of their property, and that baseboard held all mechanicals and was perfectly clean and easy to get into as needed.
Drywall is manageable and cheap, I agree. But it's more painful than it should be for something that _will_ require maintenance.
This sounds great but violates all the building codes for a variety of reasons: eddy currents, risk of electrocution if there’s a short somewhere, noise in telecom cables, etc.
Mass production should be able to make this standard. Walls don't vary that much.
Personally I've been printing snap in access panels whenever I have to get into a wall these days - in white PETG they pretty much disappear into the wall for me.
And do what? Leave the ducting, pipes, and electrical lines exposed for the one time in 20 years you need to do something with them?
In addition to being much more attractive than exposed infrastructure, drywall and the insulation that gets put behind it help make your house much more energy efficient.
I wouldn't call it easy, but it's conceptually simple to cut a square hole in some drywall to access behind it, and then pop the piece back in with screws, mud, and tape, then paint.
For sure. I've wired my old house with speakers in every ceiling, and cat-6 in every room. I've had a small pipe burst and a couple leaks behind a bathroom.
I've patched quite a bit of drywall, and I'm about mediocre at it. But it seems so silly and unnecessary to me.
Everything else in this world that requires maintenance comes with access panels and other means of easy access. In our living spaces, some of which should ideally last tens of years (mine is from the 1890s), we seal it all away.
Rarely do pipes, wires, or ducts just outright fail even in 50 years. Usual case for tearing out drywall is for voluntary renovations. Shit behind the wall just doesn't "fail" if it is left undisturbed or you were unlucky like those that got defective PEX or similar installed.
Generally things that are illegal are illegal because enough people have maimed or killed themselves with it in ways that are not “common sense”. For example, you can’t simply have electrical wire stapled to the bottom of the joists in the basement because people might try to hang clothes off of them.
People prefer how it looks and it's also more convenient to have a square room and no irregular protrusions stopping you pushing furniture up against the wall.
In the UK it used to be common for pipework to be exposed and painted. Electrical conduit is pretty common in "industrial" places like garages but the number of sockets people expect now would mean you'd barely have a flat wall anywhere.
The current preference is definitely for clean looking, square rooms. When pipes don't fit in the walls themselves, like soil pipes or around boilers, they are boxed in or hidden away in a cupboard.
> Some buildings standing today still have wattle-and-daub panels from 700 years ago.
Will any drywalled building survive even a tenth of this time?
> The plaster mixture used then was a homegrown concoction, with recipes matching the climate needs and vernacular material availability.
The wonder of wattle-and-daub (clay) and plaster-and-lath (lime) is that the materials are breathable, move with the structure, and can even self-repair small cracks. I don't know of any old house that suffers from black mold...
My last big gripe with gypsum drywall is disposal. Demolish a property with clay or lime walls, and they'll naturally degrade into the environment. Drywall needs proper disposal: "Do not burn: Drywall releases toxic fumes. Do not bury: It can create dangerous hydrogen sulfide gas in landfill."
A huge share of the gypsum used in drywall is *synthetic gypsum* — a byproduct of flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) at coal-fired power plants. When SO₂ is scrubbed from exhaust using limestone, the reaction produces calcium sulfate dihydrate, chemically identical to mined gypsum. In the US, FGD gypsum has accounted for roughly half of all gypsum consumed by the wallboard industry at its peak.
The "cheap, uniform, and free of defects" story is partly a story about coal. The drywall industry scaled on the back of an abundant, nearly free waste stream from the energy sector. It's a classic example of industrial symbiosis — one industry's pollution abatement becomes another's feedstock.
And it cuts the other way now: as coal plants shut down across Europe and North America, synthetic gypsum supply is shrinking. The drywall industry is facing a real raw material squeeze, with manufacturers having to shift back toward mined gypsum or find alternative sources. There's ongoing work on using phosphogypsum (from fertilizer production) but that comes with its own radioactivity concerns.
For someone in your position this is particularly relevant — the "wonder" of drywall is entangled with the fossil fuel economy in a way that makes earth-based construction methods look increasingly attractive as that supply chain unwinds.
Fascinating. I wonder if supply constraints will make drywall recycling profitable.
Picture rails are a kitschy and twee feature that few people today even know their purpose, but anyone who tells you that they’re just as good for hanging things on are committing perjury
In my humble opinion, they are significantly better than pounding a nail into drywall. Of course, I also have an absurdly large collection of framed photographs and other art, all of varying sizes, and I love swapping frames around throughout my home. Having picture rails throughout my house means I don't have to keep pounding holes in the wall every time I replace that 20x20" photograph of my toddler shot in a square aspect ratio with a 16x20 shot on my 4x5, or whatever.
Many people only think of picture rail as what you find in old Victorian homes, but modern picture rail can be much less obtrusive and lightweight. I have a lot of framed art as well. When I finally bought a house I installed STAS minirail throughout. The "wires" are transparent Perlon filament, and anything you hang can instantly be adjusted vertically and horizontally.
This is way better than arguing with partner about the proper height, making a destructive hole, then having to cover/patch when opinions or artwork change. My walls are not drywall, so that was a big factor, but the freedom to arrange/rearrange is a major benefit.
Do picture rails work for gallery walls (clusters of frames)?
And the author completely misses the point thinking it's somehow mandatory in plaster walls, when it's just a convenience thing that avoids making holes in the plaster…
Interesting to me that no mention of the use of drywall (in various forms) to act as a substrate for actual plaster. This seems common in the UK from what I understand from my family back there, and it is also common in the USA in high end residential construction. It is particular common in Santa Fe where I live now (for high end anyway) because the so-called "diamond plaster" look & feel is very popular. So, you still build with stick frames (or in a few cases, cinder block), cover that with drywall/sheetrock, then plaster it.
yeah, my parents' US home (which was originally my grandmother's) in the eastern half of the US has plaster-on-drywall construction.
it is a bitch and a half for hanging anything (just like plaster on lath), plus it screws up wifi.
Pro tip for finding a stud, if you have access to the bare floor -- stick a drywalling knife / spatula under the bottom trim and poke. you can find the studs that way, and then measure off since 16" is pretty common. Measuring off the edge of an electrical box can work too, but you have to figure out what side of the stud the box is on...
It is indeed how it's done in the UK. It's a bit of a cliché for British people to complain about American houses, but it's not that we don't have stud walls ourselves, it's just that we don't just go and paint directly on top of plasterboard. Both walls and ceilings are skimmed, with either plaster or shudder Artex. We also have dot and dab walls which are built from block, have a layer of plasterboard glued, leaving a ~6mm cavity, then skimmed with plaster.
> It’s impossible to mount even lightweight items such as picture frames onto the wall, because even the tiniest hole from nails or the like would crumble and erode into dust.
The trick for this is to just find the stud. Same thing you'd have to do in drywall. For light stuff like photos, you can get away with putting a nail right into the lathe without having to find a stud. If you miss the lathe (you can tell) just move the nail up a half inch.
Ha! If I even look at my lath and plaster walls the wrong way a little bit crumbles away.
The trick is to have 100 years of landlord special paint holding it together
I really like this guy's drywall-install how-to videos: https://www.youtube.com/@vancouvercarpenter
I think this misses the beauty of a plaster wall. Level 5 drywall has nothing on a skilled artisan with plaster, and yeah you can’t hang things through it but it also lasts hundreds of years. My walls are 120 years old and robust, the kids haven’t damaged them and they’ve more than held up.
You can hang things through it just as easy as drywall too. Light stuff just put it right into the lathe. Heavy stuff, with both types of walls you are going to want to anchor into a stud.
Ctrl F "brick". Nothing about bricks and concrete in all the history of wall surfaces.
Brick is mentioned near the top:
> a method of constructing walls that has been a mainstay for at least 6,000 years, predating mud bricks
To be fair the article is about drywall and its history, not the history of all walls in general.
I was thinking of fired brick and concrete, which solves much of his problems of drilling into walls.
“You’re in luck if you’ve been hankering to have your wall connected to wifi.”
It’s so they can begin selling you a subscription to allow you to hang a picture.
some interesting new failure modes also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_drywall
I will never understand why we fill our walls with mechanical and electrical infrastructure and then wrap them in a paper and plaster, which then needs to be torn, broken, and repaired in order to maintain said infrastructure.
Pipes will fail. Wires will fail. Ducts will fail. Maybe not in 5 years, but over the span of 20, they will. Why make them so frustratingly inaccessible?
Drywall is trivial to remove and repair, I have no issue cutting walls with a circular saw or vibrating cutter to get access then patching it.
I have seen another method for making walls that were accessible though, from a homesteader/ hand tool woodworker and carpenter. His walls were 24” thick with huge areas for piping and electrical and had 4x4’ removable wood panels.
https://youtu.be/8fdm9R1Cbm0?si=9SRXgcdutos-hywc
It's the repainting that bothers me
I wouldn't call it trivial. First you have to determine where to cut it; if you cut the wrong area you have to cut again. All the steps in repairing it either take time, are messy, or require some skill, and the time adds up (e.g. waiting for the patch to dry before you can sand; waiting for the primer to dry before you can paint; etc.).
And then you have to match the surrounding paint, which is all but impossible since even if you have the same color, the original will have likely faded over the years, making your newly applied coat a mismatch, so now you have to paint the entire wall (no fun when it's a big wall). And if you had wallpaper instead of paint, good luck to you unless you saved some extra scraps.
All in all, an access panel would make the job much simpler.
The thing is you might not need to access your electric or plumbing for like 100 years. You do get a panel where access is presumably on a more regular schedule: usually the shower hookups are accessible from a closet.
What's the alternative, though? Removable panels will be more expensive, and troublesome in various ways.
Drywall is not too bad to deal with. And 99% of the wall surface doesn't need to be opened for a -long- time.
I watched a video recently, which I can't find, where an architect set up a beautiful wooden baseboard around the entirety of their property, and that baseboard held all mechanicals and was perfectly clean and easy to get into as needed.
Drywall is manageable and cheap, I agree. But it's more painful than it should be for something that _will_ require maintenance.
This sounds great but violates all the building codes for a variety of reasons: eddy currents, risk of electrocution if there’s a short somewhere, noise in telecom cables, etc.
Mass production should be able to make this standard. Walls don't vary that much.
Personally I've been printing snap in access panels whenever I have to get into a wall these days - in white PETG they pretty much disappear into the wall for me.
Odds are you are compromising the fire safety of your residence by doing this.
And do what? Leave the ducting, pipes, and electrical lines exposed for the one time in 20 years you need to do something with them?
In addition to being much more attractive than exposed infrastructure, drywall and the insulation that gets put behind it help make your house much more energy efficient.
No -- use doors.
So a bunch of doors everywhere you don't open for potentially 100 years?
I wouldn't call it easy, but it's conceptually simple to cut a square hole in some drywall to access behind it, and then pop the piece back in with screws, mud, and tape, then paint.
For sure. I've wired my old house with speakers in every ceiling, and cat-6 in every room. I've had a small pipe burst and a couple leaks behind a bathroom.
I've patched quite a bit of drywall, and I'm about mediocre at it. But it seems so silly and unnecessary to me.
Everything else in this world that requires maintenance comes with access panels and other means of easy access. In our living spaces, some of which should ideally last tens of years (mine is from the 1890s), we seal it all away.
If you think the drywall access situation is bad, don't start working on your cars.
Rarely do pipes, wires, or ducts just outright fail even in 50 years. Usual case for tearing out drywall is for voluntary renovations. Shit behind the wall just doesn't "fail" if it is left undisturbed or you were unlucky like those that got defective PEX or similar installed.
Maybe you're thinking of poly-B, not PEX.
Cheaper than building them behind concrete or brick.
I think the question is: why are they behind anything to begin with?
Conduit all the things and paint to match?
This is essentially what some industrial-style lofts do.
Probably not legal.
Generally things that are illegal are illegal because enough people have maimed or killed themselves with it in ways that are not “common sense”. For example, you can’t simply have electrical wire stapled to the bottom of the joists in the basement because people might try to hang clothes off of them.
You don’t need to explain that to me.
People prefer how it looks and it's also more convenient to have a square room and no irregular protrusions stopping you pushing furniture up against the wall.
In the UK it used to be common for pipework to be exposed and painted. Electrical conduit is pretty common in "industrial" places like garages but the number of sockets people expect now would mean you'd barely have a flat wall anywhere.
The current preference is definitely for clean looking, square rooms. When pipes don't fit in the walls themselves, like soil pipes or around boilers, they are boxed in or hidden away in a cupboard.
There are reasons not to like gypsum drywall:
> Some buildings standing today still have wattle-and-daub panels from 700 years ago.
Will any drywalled building survive even a tenth of this time?
> The plaster mixture used then was a homegrown concoction, with recipes matching the climate needs and vernacular material availability.
The wonder of wattle-and-daub (clay) and plaster-and-lath (lime) is that the materials are breathable, move with the structure, and can even self-repair small cracks. I don't know of any old house that suffers from black mold...
My last big gripe with gypsum drywall is disposal. Demolish a property with clay or lime walls, and they'll naturally degrade into the environment. Drywall needs proper disposal: "Do not burn: Drywall releases toxic fumes. Do not bury: It can create dangerous hydrogen sulfide gas in landfill."
Does anyone want to live with that?