Solving the environmental toll has been a priority for GAF, the biggest roof manufacturer in North America. More than 12 billion square feet of shingles are manufactured each year, and they last about 15 to 20 years on the typical roof before they need to be replaced. “What do we do with those shingles when we take them off?” asks Jim Schnepper, the company’s president. After four years of development, GAF, an operating company of Standard Industries, has announced an industry first: a new patented process whereby otherwise wasted asphalt is recycled and converted into new shingles for roofs—creating a circular roofing system that the company aims to streamline into its entire product line.

 

Recycling asphalt is not a new technique; roof shingles are sometimes recycled into paving shingles, but it’s proved easier for the paving industry to create a circular system, recycling old road asphalt for new road asphalt. For the roofing industry, trials so far have struggled to find the balance between cost and performance, says Dan Boss, GAF’s senior VP of research and development. It’s expensive to extract the pure asphalt out of the shingles; on the other hand, keeping the other materials in the shingle—namely the rock granules—can degrade the quality of the new product. Boss says GAF has now perfected an affordable way of recycling the shingles, while cleanly removing that “stone dust,” whereby 90% of the shingle waste material is reused.

The shingles are removed from roofs, and sent back to GAF in large chunks. They chop those into four-inch squares, remove the rock granules (which they then set aside and reuse later). The pieces, rich in asphalt, are ground up into a powder, and then compacted into small briquettes “that [look] a lot like the charcoal that you’ve used on your grill,” Boss says. Those are taken to a plant, where they’re melted at a high temperature in a tank. They’re combined with new raw materials to create new shingles, which contain up to 15% recycled material.

Schnepper stresses the company’s commitment to finding sustainable new means of roofing, even if that means turning to novel materials. But, asphalt isn’t going anywhere; in fact, the market is growing, likely to surpass $9.5 billion in size by 2025. So, for now, circular shingles are the way to make the most difference. “The potential impact of this product,” he says, “clearly makes it the most significant sustainability initiative that we, at GAF, have ever taken on.”

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