But as New Orleans showed, convenience comes with a cost.

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Drywall was invented in 1916. The United States Gypsum Corporation, a company that vertically integrated 30 different gypsum and plaster manufacturing companies 14 years prior, created it to protect homes from urban fires, and marketed it as the poor man’s answer to plaster walls. A 1921 USG ad billed drywall as a fireproof wall that went up with “no time [lost] in preparing materials, changing types of labor, or waiting for the building to dry.”

Drywall didn’t catch on right away, but in the 1940s, sales grew rapidly thanks to the baby boom. Between 1946 and 1960, more than 21 million new homes were built nationwide for the tens of millions of additional babies. “People wanted white bread and confectioner’s sugar,” says Mouzon. “They wanted a neat, tidy little white-boxed world in the 1950s after the war. It made perfect sense then.”

Today, USG is by far the largest of the eight gypsum manufacturers in North America. It holds around a quarter of the wallboard industry’s market share and does $4 billion in sales a year. (Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet's conglomerate, owns 27 percent of the company.) It gets its gypsum from mines or as a synthetically engineered byproduct of coal-fired power plants. If current production rate stays constant, USG believes there’s at least 350 years worth of gypsum available on Earth.

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Though ideal for construction, gypsum is not known for its environmental friendliness. Workers in gypsum mines—either above-ground quarries or pasty-white caverns—inhale a lot of gypsum dust, which the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends must be limited to 15 milligrams per cubic meter during a typical workday. And areas with disused mines are prone to ground collapse when surface developments disturb the cavities below. (The upside? Gypsum mines bring jobs to communities in states that produce the most gypsum, like Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Indiana, Nevada, and California.)

After gypsum is mined and manufactured into drywall, it’s shipped out to contractors and retailers to be used for new construction. According to the EPA, once that construction is finished, most scraps are sent directly to landfills. There, gypsum becomes wet, mixes with other organic materials, and turns into hydrogen sulfide, a rotten, egg-smelling gas lethal to humans in high doses. The compound can contaminate water and raise its acidity—a risk to marine and freshwater animals.

“When site workers put drywall scraps into a dumpster, they consider themselves at the tail end of a waste cycle,” says Amanda Kaminsky, founder of Building Products Ecosystems in Brooklyn. “We're trying change workers' mindsets to realize they’re at the beginning of the manufacturing process.” To do so, Kaminsky’s company is coming up with ways to educate construction teams on safely sorting waste materials and delivering scraps to gypsum-specific recycling facilities. These facilities, like USA Gypsum (USG), in Pennsylvania, can recycle most of the waste and turn scraps into agricultural products. USA Gypsum makes a gypsum soil additive that helps some crops, such as tomatoes, become tastier, for instance.