Owens Corning (NYSE: OC) is making progress toward its goal of creating a circular shingle economy and diverting debris from landfills. The firm said that it has achieved significant progress on two main shingle recycling workstreams that are critical to meeting its goal of recycling two million tons of shingles per year in the United States by 2030. 

Owens Corning and its partners will launch an Asphalt shingle recycling pilot in late 2022, with the goal of deconstructing residential and industrial waste shingles and extracting their component elements. The plant has successfully deconstructed shingles and retrieved asphalt, granules, and filler in less than a year of operation. The procedure is meant to reclaim the full shingle, preventing any product components from going to waste. 

Owens Corning

The components collected using this procedure have yielded promising preliminary results, which are in accordance with the company’s expectations. Owens Corning and its partners are still modifying and improving the pilot process in order to optimize the produced components for a variety of future applications.  

“The progress being made at the pilot is a very promising step toward the future of shingle recycling,” Owens Corning Roofing President Gunner Smith said. “What began in the lab with shingle deconstruction using benchtop materials and testing has now been proven at the pilot scale.” The next stage will be plant experiments, in which we will use the harvested elements to produce new prototype shingles.” 

The company and its partners will continue to scale up the pilot facility for higher material output and evaluation, in addition to building numerous prototypes with recycled components for rigorous testing. 

Owens Corning is dedicated to increasing the usage of recycled shingles in asphalt paving applications. To help in this effort, the company has teamed up with the National Center for Asphalt Technology (NCAT) to do research on the use of recycled shingles in pavement. 

The NCAT collaboration is testing the performance of asphalt mixtures made using a balanced mix design and recycled asphalt shingles (RAS). It is also analyzing the environmental impact of RAS in paving applications and, for the first time, will collect full lifecycle assessment data on recycled asphalt shingles used in pavement. This data can then be published in industry-wide recommendations to help educate asphalt contractors across the United States. 

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