Page 44 - BusinessWest December 8, 2025

Greg Bossie says it was important to him to launch a mission-
and values-driven company.
Staff Photo
tion homes,” he explained. “And then, a year and a half ago, we
actively pushed into the straw panel aspect of things, which had
been my goal for quite a while.
“Straw panels allow us to build homes and additions that actu-
ally store more embodied carbon than they emit in the construction
process,” he went on. “The construction industry has been focused
on what we call operational carbon for a long time, which is energy
usage — and trying to reduce our energy usage — and we’ve made
incredible strides with that over the last 30 years or so.
“But in the last 10 years — really, the last five to seven
years — people started to seriously look at embodied carbon
and realize that, in the current state of climate crisis, opera-
tional carbon is really important; it adds up over the lifetime
of a building. But all of that embodied carbon happens now.
And lots of buildings get built in such a way that they have
an incredibly high embodied carbon footprint.”
What Rare Forms does, Bossie explained, is use bio-
based building materials to substantially reduce or even
invert the embodied carbon aspect of building, while also
maintaining high building performance and the low energy
usage. Another motivation is better indoor air quality, mean-
ing greater comfort and health for building occupants.
“There’s a lot of asthma issues that are caused by build-
ing materials from all the foams, so we’re trying to build
with completely foam-free assemblies wherever possible,
which, in new construction is very achievable; with retrofits,
it can be a little bit more difficult with older structures.”
While the straw to create the wall panels is sourced from
Hadley, the company’s roof panels are insulated with a prod-
uct called TimberHP, a wood fiber insulation product manu-
factured in Madison, Maine, from waste timber from that
state’s sprawling timber industry.
In short, “we think about sustainability pretty holistically,”
Bossie told BusinessWest. “There’s the materials side of things,
which is choosing what you build the house out of. There’s also the
waste management, doing as much selective deconstruction as pos-
sible, meaning saving fixtures, finishes, any building materials you
can, keeping as much out of the landfill to begin with as possible,
either saving materials for use in the project or donating those
materials.”
Meanwhile, the company works with local sawyers to source tim-
ber locally, and also strives to reduce transportation emissions. For
example, while Rare Forms mainly works in the 413, it’s currently
working on a project in Peru, Vt., and has come up with a way to
lessen travel impact on the environment.
“Our team meets here at the shop, and they carpool in one vehi-
“We think about
sustainability
pretty
holistically.”
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