Exterior cladding made of stone wool: naturally built-in fire safety

Of course, improving fire safety in buildings is primarily about protecting people. Still, there’s a lot more to take into consideration here. Building in a firesafe way also highly contributes to a sustainable world.

A major aspect of sustainability is limiting the use of new valuable resources. In the building industry, this is not only a matter of recycling and upcycling as much as possible, but it’s also about building for the long term. When you build or renovate a building, it’s important to make it as futureproof as possible, for example by looking at energy efficiency and fire safety.

If a building is not firesafe, there’s a significant risk of it burning down completely during a fire. In that case, valuable resources are lost. When building in a responsible and firesafe way, you can design out the risks. That’s why using non-combustible building materials such as Rockpanel is a sustainable choice.

Rockpanel exterior cladding is fire resilient by nature. To understand why, we need to look at what it’s made of. Rockpanel boards are made of highly compressed stone wool fibres from the natural material basalt, a volcanic rock with can withstand extremely high temperatures by nature. The panels therefore have a low calorific content, which is a very important factor when it comes to fire safety. The calorific content is the amount of energy that is produced by the complete combustion of a material. This amount of energy determines how much heat a certain material contributes to a fire. More heat simply means a faster spreading of the fire.

As Rockpanel is made of stone wool fibres and has a very low calorific content, the fire resilience of this material is naturally built-in. In many other facade materials, this is not the case. For many of them, their fire classification depends on the use of chemical fire retardants.

Another strength of this built-in fire resilience is that Rockpanel does not lose its capacity to resist fire over time. The fire resilience is built-in for good, making the material even more futureproof and sustainable.