Plasterboard Manufacturing: From Lime Plaster to ABB

Behind almost every modern interior wall sits a sheet of gypsum between two layers of paper. Plasterboard manufacturing turns rock into those sheets on long continuous lines, and at the end of each line heavy, dusty handling still limits how fast a plant can ship. This post looks at how walls were plastered by hand, how Sackett board and later gypsum board lines replaced that work, and what plants are dealing with today. It also covers where ABB robots fit in the factory, stacking, handling and palletizing boards and bagged plaster. Finishing drywall on site is a separate topic.

The Knauf plasterboard plant on Kings Road, Immingham, England, 2006. Photo: David Wright via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How plaster walls went from wet trade to board

For centuries walls were finished with wet plaster. Lime or gypsum plaster was mixed on site and laid by hand onto masonry or onto thin wooden strips called lath, usually in several coats, each of which had to dry before the next went on. Plaster of Paris takes its name from the gypsum quarried around Paris, which was heated to drive off water and then mixed back into a paste that set hard. Old buildings everywhere still show the method, including the lath and plaster visible inside the Tower of London.

Wooden lath and remains of plaster on a wall inside the Tower of London. Photo: McPhail via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The first move away from wet plaster came in 1890. Augustine Sackett and Fred L. Kane, who worked for the New York Coal Tar Chemical Company, developed Sackett board by layering plaster within four plies of wool felt paper. The sheets measured 36 by 36 inches, were a quarter inch thick and had open edges. Nailed up in place of lath, they gave plasterers a flat base to work on. Plaster walls on wood lath stayed common for decades, and builders kept testing them for fire, as in a 1934 trial of lime plaster on wood lath with rock wool fill.

Test No. 44 in 1934: a partition of lime plaster on wood lath with rock wool fill, wired for testing. Photo: Harris and Ewing via Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Gypsum board as we know it took shape between 1910 and 1930. Makers wrapped the board edges and dropped the inner felt layers in favour of paper facings. United States Gypsum bought the Sackett Plaster Board Company in 1910 and had introduced Sheetrock by 1917. Air entrainment later made boards lighter and less brittle. The basic process has stayed the same: calcined gypsum is mixed with water into a slurry, spread between two sheets of heavy paper, left to set on a long belt and then dried in large drying chambers.

A crusher and conveyor at a gypsum mine in Milford, Nova Scotia, before 1970. Photo: Nova Scotia Information Service via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Plasterboard plants and robots today

A modern plant starts with crushed gypsum rock or synthetic gypsum, calcines it and feeds a forming line where slurry meets paper. The continuous board is cut to length while it sets, then dried, trimmed and stacked into bundles for shipping. Much of that stacking is done by dedicated stackers and conveyors built into the line. Many gypsum plants also fill bags of plaster and joint compound, and palletizing bags is a classic robot job. Our drywall finishing robot post covers what happens to the boards once they reach a building site.

Mining gypsum at Lake MacDonnell near Kevin, Eyre Peninsula, South Australia. Photo: Alexander Macduff via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The last few weeks brought two pieces of bad news for board makers. On 2 September 2026 Georgia-Pacific said it would permanently close its gypsum board plant in Tacoma, Washington, affecting 125 full time employees. The company blamed a long slump in home turnover, which drives repair and remodel work and is at a 30 year low. In early October the Bay Area air district fined Gold Bond $188,500 over mineral dust from its wallboard plant in Richmond, California. Weak demand and dust control are both problems that automation is often asked to help with.

The British Plasterboard Jericho Works seen across a field, 2005. Photo: Bob Danylec via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ABB robots already palletize building materials. CED Stone Group in the UK upgraded to an ABB IRB 6640 to palletize 25 kg bags and reported about 1,680 bags a day. ABB's IRB 460 and IRB 660 are four axis palletizers for end of line stacking, and the IRB 760 moves whole layers at once. We found no public ABB project that stacks plasterboard itself. Handling heavy boards with large arms such as the IRB 6700 or IRB 8700 and vacuum grippers is therefore a possibility that we have not seen in a reference plant.

An ABB four-axis palletizing robot with a layer gripper in a packaging line cell. Photo: ABB

Where plasterboard factory automation goes next

In plants, the next steps are likely to be more flexibility and fewer people working in dusty areas. Lines make many board types, thicknesses and lengths, so robot cells that switch stacking patterns in software suit them better than fixed machines. Such patterns are usually designed and tested in RobotStudio before a real pallet is touched. Autonomous mobile robots such as ABB's Flexley Mover could, as a possibility, carry paper rolls, additives and lab samples around a plant, and robots could cut test pieces from boards for quality checks.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604 moves loads around a plant without fixed tracks. Photo: ABB

For homeowners, most changes will show up in the boards themselves. Makers already sell lighter, moisture resistant and fire rated boards, and they are recycling more gypsum from offcuts and demolition. In September 2026 Saint-Gobain Canada said it was expanding gypsum recycling through CertainTeed Recycle. Sorting and handling recycled board is messy work that robots could take on in future. For another building material made in bulk and stacked by robots, see our post on brick manufacturing.

A covered conveyor for gypsum running across farmland in England, 2006. Photo: Bob Jenkins via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Cost is the main obstacle. Demand is weak, as the Tacoma closure shows, so a robot cell has to pay back quickly. Dust comes second, because gypsum dust gets into joints, sensors and vacuum grippers, and robots need protection and regular cleaning. Large boards are heavy and flexible, and they crack or lose their paper edges if handled roughly. Big arms need fencing, scanners or SafeMove zones, and many plants have few staff trained to program and maintain robots.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifting a large flat panel with a vacuum gripper at dhp technology. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com