First home going up at Aurora's new ‘smart neighborhood'
Habitat Green Freedom, located near the intersection of Jericho Road and Edgelawn Drive, will eventually hold 17 homes designed with energy efficiency, green energy and resiliency in mind. Construction began this week on the neighborhood's show home, which is set to be complete by mid-October, and five other houses are expected to be built by December.
'This is a project that we've been dreaming about and working on for many, many years, and today it finally becomes a reality,' Barb Beckman, executive director of the Northern Fox Valley's Habitat for Humanity, said at a construction kick-off event on Tuesday morning.
The neighborhood's homes are expected to be affordable not only because of Habitat for Humanity's special mortgages but also because of technology incorporated into the houses themselves, which should lower homeowners' utility bills. Some of that technology includes rooftop solar panels, batteries to store energy from the solar panels, smart thermostats and energy-efficient appliances.
Plus, the houses are being built in ways that will make them more energy-efficient. One of those building techniques was showcased at Tuesday's kick-off event: foam blocks connected by plastic webs that fit together sort of like LEGO bricks.
The modular foam pieces, made by BuildBlock Building Systems, are interlaced with rebar as they build up the walls of the structure. The blocks are then used as a mold for concrete, giving the building technique the name 'insulating concrete form.'
Micah Garrett, CEO of BuildBlock, said the insulating concrete form walls will make the houses both disaster resilient and energy efficient, helping to lower utility costs by 30% to 40%. The blocks also make construction faster, as they account for what would normally be multiple steps in the building process while only weighing seven or eight pounds.
In fact, the blocks were so easy to use that government and company officials who attended the kick-off event helped to build up one of the house's walls after only a short lesson from Garrett.
The goal of the energy-efficient building techniques and integrated technology is to make the homes 'net-zero,' meaning that they produce as much energy as they take to power, heat and cool, according to a fact sheet distributed at the event. The homes are also 'dual-fuel,' using both electricity and natural gas, which the fact sheet said can be more cost-effective and comfortable in a cold climate like Illinois.
Specifically, natural gas is expected to power the homes' heating and water heating systems, said a different fact sheet also distributed at the event.
It is because of Nicor Gas' support that Habitat for Humanity can built 'not just houses, but affordable and resilient homes that will be strong foundations for Habitat families,' Beckman said. Habitat brings expertise in housing development, she said. while Nicor brings to the project expertise in energy and innovation.
Wendell Dallas, president and CEO of Nicor Gas, said it is a privilege to serve the families that will one day be living in the neighborhood.
'I've had the wonderful privilege of working with the team over these past few years, and now seeing this come up out of the ground to actually become a reality is just an amazing, wonderful, incredible achievement,' Dallas said.
Nicor is doing what few companies these days are doing: looking to the future rather than just short-term profits, according to U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, D-Naperville, who helped secure $1.25 million in federal funding for the project. Plus, he said Habitat for Humanity is an important part of the solution to the affordable housing crisis in America.
Aurora Mayor John Laesch, who said he also supported the project when he was an alderman, is looking forward to when the project is complete and to see 'all the geeky numbers' like how much energy will be saved. As a green builder himself, Laesch is working to make his 120-year-old home more energy-efficient, but if he had to build new, 'this is exactly what I'd be doing,' he said.
'This is the future, and it's exciting that all these partners have come together to make this home possible,' Laesch said at the event.
This first house going up on the site of the future neighborhood will be built by Habitat for Humanity of Northern Fox Valley, but the other five homes to be built this year will be done through a Habitat-organized 'Home Builders Blitz' that will bring in volunteer builders and tradespeople to get the job done in a shorter timeline.
All of the homes in Habitat Green Freedom will go to those in Habitat for Humanity of Northern Fox Valley's home ownership program, which can be applied for at habitatnfv.org. According to the website, applicants are selected for the program based on their level of housing need, willingness to become partners in the program and their ability to repay the no-profit, no-interest loan.
Nicor Gas' partnership with Habitat for Humanity is also bringing a smart neighborhood to Carpentersville, though the homes will be different. This will allow Nicor Gas to see how various building techniques and technologies impact energy use and other factors throughout the year, according to a fact sheet.
Southern Company, the parent company of Nicor Gas, also has other 'smart neighborhoods' in Georgia, Alabama and soon in Mississippi, a fact sheet said, but the ones in Aurora and Carpentersville are the first to use natural gas.
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Attribute Pasted Paper Valve Bags PP Woven Valve Bags Kraft-PP Laminated Valve Bags Basis Weight 2–4 ply × 70–100 gsm 95 g m⁻² + 25 µm coat 90 gsm kraft + 65 g m⁻² PP + 25 µm coat Burst Strength ≥12 kN m⁻¹ (TAPPI T-403) ≥110 N (ASTM D5034) ≥105 N WVTR 0.9 g m⁻² 24 h⁻¹ 0.7 g m⁻² 24 h⁻¹ 0.6 g m⁻² 24 h⁻¹ Fill Speed 8–10 bags min⁻¹ 10–12 bags min⁻¹ 9–11 bags min⁻¹ Recyclability Compostable minus liner Mono-PP Hydropulpable + PP recycle Problem Definition: A Brazilian fertilizer blender reports 4 % moisture-caking loss in rainy season. Root-Cause Audit: VidePak engineers find stitched PP sacks inhaling ambient humidity via needle holes. Solution Proposal: Switch to Kraft-PP Laminated Valve Bags with EVOH valve sleeve using same Starlinger filling spout; CapEx USD 28 k for new sleeve inserter. Pilot & Measure: 10,000-bag trial, water activity cut from 0.75 to 0.45 in 30-day storage. Scale-up ROI: Annualised saving USD 92 k product loss; payback <4 months; CO₂e down 14 %. Moisture Barrier from laminate from laminate Tensile Safety from PP weave from PP weave Brand Narrative from paper print These merge into a single SK-aligned SKU: a bag that fills fast, stands square, survives monsoon, and advertises nutrients—closing the circle from operations to marketing. FIBC might carry a tonne, but valve-bags move the world 25 kg at a time. Selecting between Pasted Paper, PP Woven, and Kraft-PP Laminated Valve Bags is no longer about price per thousand; it is a calculus of powder morphology, climate corridor, robotic palletiser spec, and brand Pantone. VidePak's dual-platform investment—W&H for paper finesse, Starlinger for polymer rigor—backs every selection with ISO 9001 discipline and SGS-audited data. For deeper diagnostics or real-time simulations, click the interactive calculator on our knowledge hub. And if you require direct consultation, our engineers are one valve-bag prototype away from eliminating dust, downtime, and doubt. What does it mean for a package to think on its feet? Valve Bags embody that idea. They open wide when met by a filling spout yet snap shut the instant back-pressure rises—an elegant choreography of physics that needs no stitches, no hot bars, no zip ties. Picture thousands of kilograms of cement moving from silo to pallet: open-mouth sacks demand secondary sewing, hot sealing, or adhesive taping, each step an extra beat in the production drum. Valve Bags fold those beats into a single downstroke: product in, entrapped air out, sleeve collapsed, pallet away. Horizontally, the method resembles the synchronized ballet of beverage bottling, where capping overlaps pouring; vertically, it scales from a benchtop pilot trial to a 16-spout rotary packer without rewriting the playbook. 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Filling Spout — an impeller or air-packer head fitted with an inflatable collar that grips the sleeve like an o-ring, forestalling spillage. — an impeller or air-packer head fitted with an inflatable collar that grips the sleeve like an o-ring, forestalling spillage. Check-Weigher & Reject Gate — an electronic arbiter that allows only those Valve Bags falling within ±0.2 % of target mass to proceed to palletising. Each part listens to the next in a feedback loop; disturb one and the symphony goes off key. That interdependence echoes avionics systems, where sensor, processor, and actuator converse in milliseconds to keep a jet on course. Why elevate Valve Bags above stitched PP sacks or heat-sealed PE pillows? Consider the needle hole. Sewing punches eight perforations per centimetre, every one a conduit for ambient moisture, oxygen, and microbes. Heat sealing fares no better on dusty flanges; molten film wrinkled by stray particles forms micro-channels that weep fines. By contrast, a collapsed valve sleeve offers a serpentine path so tortuous that water vapour and cement dust abandon the journey. Cross-industry? Think of a pharmaceutical flip-top vial shielding lyophilised vaccine—integrity without auxiliary hardware. VidePak field trials register a 62 % dust-fall reduction on pallets wrapped with Valve Bags compared with sewn PP equivalents. Zero Needle Holes — third-party tests per EN 196-11 record particulate emission below 15 mg bag⁻¹; OSHA's respirable silica rule applauds. — third-party tests per EN 196-11 record particulate emission below 15 mg bag⁻¹; OSHA's respirable silica rule applauds. Faster Throughput — rotary air packers cruise at 12 bags min⁻¹, with impeller heads flirting with 18 bags min⁻¹, doubling stitched-bag cadence. — rotary air packers cruise at 12 bags min⁻¹, with impeller heads flirting with 18 bags min⁻¹, doubling stitched-bag cadence. Pallet Geometry — block-bottom Valve Bags dovetail into 1.2 m × 1.0 m pallets with 8 % less void, resisting 'doming' during stretch-wrap. — block-bottom dovetail into 1.2 m × 1.0 m pallets with 8 % less void, resisting 'doming' during stretch-wrap. Five-Face Billboard — uninterrupted panels welcome eight-colour flexo, QR codes, and Pantone-true stripes, turning bulk freight into rolling media. Readers may ask: Does faster always trump cheaper? In VidePak ROI studies, the labour delta alone—two fewer operators per line—pays for the valve upgrade inside nine months, long before dust collection or injury mitigation savings are tallied. Precision starts at the load cell. VidePak's PID-governed dosing modulates impeller RPM every 50 ms, sniping the final fill within ±50 g of a 25 kg target—0.2 % variance. Compare that with legal-for-trade tolerance of ±1 %; the margin becomes a buffer that shields brand reputation from under-weight disputes and retailer penalties. The analogy to CNC machining is apt: micrometer control on a lathe prevents downstream mis-assembly, just as gram-level dosing in Valve Bags prevents downstream recipe drift in ready-mix concrete. VidePak's W&H AD 8320 carousel compresses sleeve inflation, product injection, weighment, and bag ejection into 5.5 s. Stretch that second into an annual graph and a two-shift factory gains 12,000 extra bags per day. Horizontal comparison? SMT pick-and-place heads load dozens of electronic components a second; vertically, every shaved second compounds into days of uptime, echoing the Toyota mantra of eliminating Muda (waste). Free-flowing HDPE pellets behave like glass beads; TiO₂ sticks like wet flour. Valve Bags adapt through sleeve diameter, vent density, and antistatic liners—an agility that mirrors multi-axis machining's knack for sculpting complex geometries without changing chucks. The result: one bag architecture serves diametric extremes, yielding supply-chain simplification. Machine Optimal Bag Style Performance Sweet Spot Haver & Boecker Roto-Packer Kraft paper pressed-valve 2,200 bags h⁻¹, dust emission < 20 mg m⁻³ Starlinger CIRCULUS PP woven valve warp variance < 1 %, perfect for robotic palletisers PAYPER PFG-10 Kraft/PP laminate ±0.15 % weighing accuracy on hygroscopic blends Integration rule: spout diameter must court the sleeve like a custom collet around a cutting tool—too loose, you leak; too tight, you tear. Kraft Paper — breathability (Gurley 25 s), compostability, FSC® Chain-of-Custody C156784. — breathability (Gurley 25 s), compostability, FSC® Chain-of-Custody C156784. Woven PP — warp tensile ≥110 N (ASTM D5034), UV endurance 200 kLy, mono-polyolefin recyclability. — warp tensile ≥110 N (ASTM D5034), UV endurance 200 kLy, mono-polyolefin recyclability. Laminated Hybrids — 90 gsm kraft fused to 65 × 65 ppi PP; WVTR < 0.6 g m⁻² 24 h⁻¹; peel strength ≥3 N cm⁻¹. Material choice parallels alloy selection in aerospace: performance, cost, and compliance must interlock like dovetails. The QC quartet—burst ≥110 N, five-face drop 1.2 m, valve air-hold 0.1 bar, QUV 200 kLy—forms VidePak's non-negotiable baseline. Inline cameras verify sleeve offset within ±1 mm, echoing the vigilance of coordinate-measuring machines that police aircraft turbine blades. Any deviation triggers an auto-reject gate, nipping defects at bud stage. Please click here . Cement & Minerals, Agrochemicals, Food & Dairy Powders, Petrochemical Resins, Specialty Chemicals—each stands on the tri-pod of flowability, dust sensitivity, and moisture aversion. Valve Bags tick those boxes, making them the lingua franca of bulk powders. The grout beneath your kitchen tiles, the gluten-free flour in your muffin, the clumping litter in your cat's tray—all likely journeyed in . Next time you rip a 25-kg sack and see a folded sleeve inside, know you are witnessing silent engineering wizardry. SGS Report VP-ISO-22000-22-151, VidePak Plant #2, Apr 2025. CarbonChain LCA: CC-LCA-24-561, Valve-Bag Portfolio, Jun 2025. Haver & Boecker White Paper: 'Next-Gen Air Packers', 2024. TAPPI T-403 & ASTM D5034 standards. EU PPWR Draft Regulation (COM/2023/420). Smithers Pira Market Outlook MWPBs 2024–29. official VidePak gallery. TIME BUSINESS NEWS
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