The Way Insulation Should Be
TimberHP was born in a revitalized Madison, Maine Mill – we transformed the town’s shuttered paper mill into the first North American manufacturing facility for wood fiber insulation. Our story began with the recognition that insulation should be high performance, healthy for people, and healthy for the planet – and a commitment to bringing those insulation benefits to America.
TimberHP grew out of a partnership between two entrepreneurs: Matthew O’Malia, an award-winning architect with a reputation for developing high-performance, cost-competitive designs; and Dr. Joshua Henry, a materials chemist with years of experience elevating solutions to conserve energy and produce renewable energy.
In 2016, Henry and O’Malia saw an opportunity to combine their talents to address a major contradiction in the construction industry: while we use insulation to reduce the energy required to heat and cool our buildings, we insulate with materials highly dependent on or directly derived from fossil fuels.
Henry and O’Malia couldn’t understand why wood fiber insulation – a performance-competitive, renewable, carbon-negative insulation that has been produced in Europe for two decades – was not being made in North America.
Through grant-funded research and collaborations with European wood fiber insulation producers, the two found that their home state of Maine, where multiple paper mills have closed in recent years, could benefit from a new, high-value composite like wood fiber insulation that could make use of the same fiber stream that went into papermaking in the past.
Today, TimberHP is the first wood fiber insulation manufacturer in North America, providing batt, fill, and board insulation products to the building community.
