Enviroboard is a construction panel, generally manufactured using compressed ecologically safe sourced material. Most often this means employing the use of agricultural waste fibres, such as the post-harvest straw of rice, barley, wheat, and elephant grass

Elephant Grass

Pennisetum purpureum is a species of grass native to the tropical grasslands of Africa. It is a tall perennial plant, growing to tall, rarely up to , with leaves long and broad....

 or alternatively, a more urban waste stream such as newspaper fibre.

Construction panels built from agricultural wastes have been around for hundreds of years, especially in Central

Central Europe

Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...

 and Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

 where pressed leaves and straw were used as insulation and even structural material. Environmental board panels should not be confused with straw bale construction which does not process waste fibres into a compressed standardized board panel.

The concept of environmental construction panels dovetails with the principles of sustainability, namely reducing the impact that the entire life-cycle of constructing built environments has on the environment.

Metrics of sustainable building materials

• Source of the material.
• The energy intensity of production.
• Energy efficiency (R-value or RSI
  R-value (insulation)
  The R-value is a measure of thermal resistance used in the building and construction industry. Under uniform conditions it is the ratio of the temperature difference across an insulator and the heat flux through it or R = \Delta T/\dot Q_A.The R-value being discussed is the unit thermal resistance...
  
  ).
• The toxicity of chemicals employed in the manufacturing process.
• The potential to give off gas into the built environment.