Modular glass-house builder targets growth after double win

Vaso by Eco, a venture by Annan, Scotland-headquartered Eco Group, is one of 25 innovative SMEs picked for the fifth iteration of the Social Housing Emerging Disruptors framework, known as SHED 5.

Launched in 2022, the SHED frameworks bring social housing providers together with SMEs offering a range of new solutions. The goal is to simplify onerous public procurement processes to hasten the take-up of innovation and give emerging suppliers a better chance of market success.

Being on SHED 5, launched in January, means that for the next three years, Vaso can more easily get in front of housing associations, registered social landlords, local authorities and other bodies interested in trialling the system.

The second win came in late February when Vaso received a £330,000 grant from South of Scotland Enterprise (SOSE), in association with Scotland’s building innovation agency: Built Environment, Smarter Transformation (BE-ST).

The money will pay for the construction of a demonstration building that SOSE and BE-ST will use to promote the glass-house concept, and to expand Vaso’s production lines.

“We’ve always believed Vaso can change the way the UK thinks about construction, and this support helps us prove it at full scale,” says Eddie Black, Vaso chief executive and founder and managing director of Eco Group.

CM spoke to him to learn more about the Vaso system.

Named after the Spanish word for glass, the system’s main input is recycled bottles.

The bottles are crushed and put through a process that creates tough little glass bubbles – “Rice Krispies”, as Black describes them – which are fused with binders and compressed into a sheet.

The sheet can be coated in glass-reinforced plastic (GRP) skins configured in any way needed for the desired performance, drawing from the vast palette offered by composite engineering. The panel is 94% recycled glass.

The factory can make panels for any building design. On site, they can be bonded together or mechanically joined with composite ties and rods.

“We’re taking expertise from the composites industry, which has transformed the automotive, aviation, maritime and aerospace sectors over the last seven decades, and applying it to construction in a component fashion,” Black says.

The system was developed over decades by father-and-son team Malcolm and Simon Parrish. A little under three years ago, they approached Black for help in bringing it to market at scale. Black’s company, Eco Group, has a number of units, including outsourced manufacturing.

“I’m a commercialisation person, I help people who have technology get it accepted in the market,” he says.

When he got involved, the system had already been used over the years to build a school building in Reepham, Norwich, and a building in the Arctic Circle in Canada.

Black tested the system by building a garden gym/office/yoga studio and, in the process, fell in love with it.

Since then, he’s been growing the Vaso team, validating the Vaso system and generating market appetite.

Any building firm can use the system, says Black. “Think of it like Lego. When you buy it, you get a manual, your components and instructions, and off you go. That’s exactly our model, just at a large scale.”

He says it will fill capacity gaps in UK housebuilding, not take it over. “We need all solutions. There’s a guardedness and fear of new technology, which I don’t understand. It’s been really hard these three years trying to get the industry to see there’s a new supply chain that can help in the face of rising material costs and scarcer skills.”

The fire performance is “incredible”, he notes. In one fire test of a standard 152mm panel, it took 41 minutes for a one-degree temperature rise to register on the other side.

“It’s sand, at the end of the day, sand in a different format, so it’s extremely robust. We didn’t choose this material because it’s recycled glass. We chose it because it’s the best-performing material for this application. Its sustainability is a bonus.”

After months of back-and-forthing, Lloyd’s of London has agreed to write the warranty on the manufacturing and the product. Insurers are interested because of the havoc fires, hurricanes and floods are wreaking on buildings worldwide, Black says.

“And they understand composites because they’ve insured maritime and aviation sectors, so they know what composites have done for all these industries, including transforming Formula One,” he adds.

“All that stuff’s sexy. We want to make construction sexy again using the same technologies.”

Black acknowledges that many firms that have entered the housing market with prefabricated solutions have gone bust, but says Vaso is different.

One reason is that these companies tended to operate manual assembly lines rather than fully automated factories, like Vaso’s.

But the bigger difference, he says, is that they launched only into the housing market, and housebuilding is by nature sporadic, which is a problem when an assembly line model needs constant and predictable demand to pay for itself.

For Vaso, housing is just one of numerous markets Black is targeting.

For instance, Black says they are working on a project to replace the concrete bases for heat pumps with ones made from the Vaso glass recipe. They’re also using their panels instead of steel to make containers for battery energy storage units.

There’s more. Thanks to the flexibility composites afford, the panels can be engineered to be anti-ballistic, anti-microbial, radio-frequency and electromagnetic resistant, which means the Vaso system could be suitable for a range of applications beyond houses and schools, including security, medical, life sciences and food and beverage manufacturing.

“Say I have a biscuit factory,” says Black. “Will I just do digestives? Of course not. I’ll do any type going. We wouldn’t survive, otherwise.”

Black says being included in the SHED 5 framework is a big boost because procurement for housing is “broken”. He says it is far too restrictive and risk-averse, even calling it “backward”.

Neil Butters is operations director for Procurement for Housing (PfH), the company that manages the SHED frameworks.

He told CM the frameworks emerged during covid, when housing organisations were having to completely retool their businesses.

“They were going through the biggest shake-up they’d had probably since their inception. We recognised that innovation and the ability to adapt to change quickly were going to be more paramount for social housing providers and local authorities than it ever had been before.”

Butters continues: “It was a longstanding issue of mine that public sector procurement had a bad reputation when it came to procurement and innovation. There was always a kind of belief or attitude that ‘procurement says no’.

“So the principle behind the SHED was to make it an SME-friendly or micro-organisation-friendly space that makes the procurement and contracting of innovative products and services as simple as we could make it.”

Butters says public-sector procurement typically requires proof of millions of pounds worth of spend a year to give assurance of financial security, professional indemnity insurance of so many millions, and product liability insurance of so many millions.

Then there are the reams and reams of required documentation, such as 100-page contracts and framework tenders requiring a dozen 2,000-word responses.

“For some public sector procurement opportunities, you have to effectively write a book in response to the tender document, and these small, agile innovators don’t have big teams, they don’t have specialist resources to give to all this,” Butters adds.

“So, we just ask them basically four simple questions. What is the product and why is it innovative? What’s the benefit to the registered social landlord? What’s the benefit to residents? And where is it in its development stage? Is it ready to go or a maturing product, in which case it’s not right for us.”

Four years into the programme, Butters says three or four SMEs can expect to do well and establish a foothold during each framework’s three-year period. Others won’t, which he says is the nature of innovation and SMEs, since the data shows most SMEs fail.

But he is enthusiastic about Vaso, which is the only structural systems supplier on SHED 5. The others offer services and digital solutions for property health and safety compliance, energy saving and smart building technologies, for example.

“Vaso is definitely unique both to the SHED and across the sector, from what we’ve seen of their product and how it’s made,” he says. “It really is an exciting development in the construction space.”