By Jay Fox

Ace McArleton is the co-founder of New Frameworks, a Vermont-based worker cooperative that creates prefabricated structural straw-insulated panels (S-SIPs) for high-performance buildings. New Frameworks uses ecologically minded and regenerative building practices in conjunction with locally sourced natural materials (including not only straw, but native hardwood, clay, and stone) to produce homes that are low in embodied carbon, efficient, healthy, comfortable, and beautiful.

The Accelerator recently sat down with McArleton for an upcoming episode of the Passive House Podcast to discuss how he got his start working in the trades and eventually forged his own path. He explains that he became frustrated with the toxic materials with which construction teams worked and the toxic environment of the industry, particularly with respect to the treatment of women, people of color, and trans and queer folks.

To create a more inclusive space, McArleton co-founded New Frameworks with Jacob Deva Racusin, Julie Krouse, and Jackson Mills as a multi-racial, women-, queer- and trans-owned worker cooperative dedicated to climate justice, high-performance buildings, and the use of bio-based materials. You can learn more about New Frameworks and the technical details of their S-SIPs by watching McArleton’s appearance on PHA LIVE! back in March. You can also learn more about New Frameworks’ ethos of climate justice and social justice by visiting its site.

In addition to talking about New Frameworks and their innovative building practices, Passive House Podcast cohost Jay Fox and McArleton discuss a new venture that has evolved out of New Frameworks, known as the Seed Collaborative and the Seed Program. The Seed Collaborative is a growing network of regional manufacturers that build S-SIPs for high-performance construction.

Members of the Seed Collaborative begin their journey by taking part in the Seed Program. The three-year business incubator is designed to teach firms how to manufacture S-SIPs. As more firms “graduate” from the Seed Program, the decentralized network of companies that make up the Collaborative grows. By working together rather than in competition with one another, the Collaborative aims to accelerate the scaling of high-performance and regenerative building solutions.

This article focuses on McArleton’s efforts to grow the Seed Collaborative, but you can hear the whole interview by checking out next Tuesday’s podcast episode!

The below article has been edited for length and clarity.

Passive House Accelerator: What is Seed Collaborative, and what are some of the social and structural problems that it's hoping to address?

Ace McArleton: The Seed Collaborative is our effort to rapidly scale these [carbon-storing and high-performance] technologies and get them employed more quickly in the AEC industry.

We've seen what hiding our IP and being in competition with one another does for slowing the rate of innovation and the broad scale adoption of new practices. We take a different approach and say, “We don't own this technology. This is open-source technology.” Anybody can get Chris Magwood's awesome prefab straw book and read it. There's nothing secret about it. There's nothing even that complicated about it. Any person who's done some basic building could look at it and understand, okay, this is how you build the panel.

In 2024, two companies went through that intensive first year, and we’re very proud to say that both of them graduated with two projects already done. They were very keen, and both of them are fully launched and taking on projects now.

During years two and three, we move towards becoming equal parts of a larger Collaborative that includes New Frameworks and these seed companies. We share with each other and collaborate on research and development that might include improvements to our methodology or even marketing strategies. Eventually, we can share lobbying resources.

So that is the idea of both the Seed Program and the Seed Collaborative. It’s that we can rapidly scale in a decentralized way while building leadership and power at local levels. It creates and grows a network based on solidarity and shared power.

PHA: That sounds really cool. Are you working with other straw panel manufacturers who are not part of the Collaborative?

McArleton: Yes. We're part of this group called Panelizers Anonymous.

PHA: Love it.

McArleton: Which is very awesome. The amazing Edie Dillman from B.PUBLIC is convening and hosting that. And it's been really lovely getting to just share some of the learnings and challenges that people are facing across North America.

We always believe that a rising tide raises all boats. We are not interested in competition with folks, but rather collaboration and mutual support in North America and beyond. Jacob [Deva Racusin] and I actually helped to start the Bio-Based Materials Collective. We're founding members of the steering committee for that organization—which is representing Mexico, the US, and Canada—so that we have North American representation around bio-based building materials and we can actually start to network globally with other leaders like the European Straw Building Association to help lift up these materials as a solution in the face of this really devastating climate crisis that we're all facing.

PHA: How many companies do you currently have as part of the 2025 cohort, and what's the trajectory once they're done with their first year, their second, their third?

McArleton: Two companies are currently in their second year. One is from Massachusetts: Rare Forms. The other is in Missouri: Building Integrity. In our 2025 cohort, we have three—well, technically four, but two of them are partnering. We have POM Studio Architects and Earth-Bound from the DC metro area; we have A1DesignBuild from the Pacific Northwest, in Washington state; and then Living Craft from Colorado. We're starting to really spread, which is awesome!

The two companies who graduated from the intensive first year, Rare Forms and Building Integrity, are accepting projects, they're building projects, and we’re really getting to test out the Collaborative and to see what it’s like to share leads, for instance, or to share marketing, or just how we can support each other around production or scheduling hiccups.

And as those companies matriculate through the three years, our idea is to create a shared services cooperative entity. We’ll have an entity that is not New Frameworks, which is not any of those member companies, but can be a central node for all of us and can help provide shared services for all of the member companies. That concept is called a shared services cooperative or a producer's cooperative, which is different from a worker cooperative or a consumer cooperative.

That's our goal. That's what we're building towards.

PHA: Awesome! So, are the panels all basically plug and play, or are the seedlings adapting to local conditions? Can you just use the template that you developed at New Frameworks?

McArleton: There are two parts to the work that we do. One is just the panel itself and the panelization of any design. That methodology involves taking any design and panelizing it for structural insulated straw panels, and then fabricating those based on shop drawings, shipping them to site, and then installing them. That is universal and translatable across all locations, and that's something that our seedlings take and have.

What is differentiated or created differently based on place is, one, all of the material sourcing. That includes the straw sourcing, the lumber sourcing—we try to keep within a 50- to 75-mile radius for straw sourcing for each of our seed members. Part of the goal is to find the stacked benefits in this approach, right? Not only are we building these awesome, carbon-storing, healthy, high-performance walls for these high-performance enclosures that are going to keep people safe and healthy while also keeping workers healthy as they're working with it; we’re also supporting local agriculture and putting money back into our local communities and into the farms and forests in the places where we live.

If we can stack all of those benefits, they start to really quickly multiply good things across the world, which is what we desperately need right now.

The second thing that varies occurs in pre-design. We have some pre-design kits that New Frameworks created called the Casitas. They start at around 400 square feet and go up to 1,200 square feet. These homes are pre-designed, and the materials are all specified, so there's no time or money spent on that, and we can amortize the cost of all of that for people who choose to build these homes and fabricate them.

So, the homes are made with our panels, but the part that can be particularized by our member companies in the Seed Network and the Seed Collaborative comes down to regional designs that meet the vernacular, style, feel, et cetera, of those locations. If somebody in Colorado wants the New Frameworks Casita, their local producer can basically use the pre-design to fabricate and build that locally. If somebody really loves the Colorado design in Vermont, we can do the same thing vice versa. We've set up a way of exchange within our network so that everybody's time and expertise is fairly remunerated, but these things are accessible so that we can share them and leverage the value of them.

PHA: What do you need to get a seedling up and running?

McArleton: It's a low barrier to entry for manufacturing these panels. Chris Magwood actually helped. He coached us and helped us understand the spatial requirements needed when we first started. Our first shop—which we still have—is around 4,000 square feet. You can get away with a little bit less, you can get away with a little bit more, but one of the things we do is help people work through their existing workshop or what space they might be looking at and then figure out how to lay that out for the production of straw panels.

The space doesn't even need to be conditioned. We had one of our first-year cohort members produce their first building in a covered barn space with a gravel floor. It didn't even have concrete! You can start with that. It’s possible. However, if we're talking about making production really efficient, I think at a certain point you need to make improvements.

And so that low barrier to entry is really helpful to a lot of folks around the country. We have a lot of either decaying or underused industrial buildings and manufacturing spaces. Having those being taken over by local folks who are using them to actually create a fabrication space is a really cool thing to think about. I think that's the vision.

PHA: You help bring industry back to old industrial towns.

McArleton: Yes! That's exactly what TimberHP did in Maine. They took the paper mills that were in towns that had been decimated after a lot of the paper industry moved away, and they used those paper mills to turn wood pulp into insulation. To me, this is exactly what we need to be doing to these crumbling infrastructures from yesteryear. Let's re-inhabit them and create these solutions that are going to house our people and also care for our Earth at the same time.

PHA: Do you think we’re about to see the widespread adoption of straw panels and other things we’ve talked about today, or do you think there will be a few nodes that lead the way?

McArleton: It's so interesting. Mostly because of the recent political changes in the US, I think I would have said that I could see widespread adoption. I saw national home builders—like big, tract home builders and folks like that—starting to get interested in these kinds of solutions and starting to really understand the cost of embodied carbon in our buildings—not just operational carbon. We really need to be maximizing the two in all of our builds at the moment. And I was starting to see that concept become a realization that was shared.

I think it still is, but I think questions about resources and communication are more challenging because of the current political situation. So, I think how we handle that situation is going to depend a lot on how much we can pull together and continue to communicate and continue to optimize and develop these kinds of solutions and technologies.

I am an optimist and a very practical person, and I’m reminded of something I just read earlier that says,

We don't follow hope. Hope follows us.

And I think that's what really hits home for me. It doesn't actually matter what we think will happen. It matters what we do. That's really what I believe and that’s where I work from.