Supporting sustainability in roofing systems

By Emma Peterson. 

Discover how Duro-Last's environmentally friendly practices have helped recycle over 100 million pounds of PVC. 

In a new episode of Roofing Road Trips®, Megan Ellsworth dives into the world of sustainability with Tess Heston. Tess works at Duro-Last as their sustainability specialist. Her background includes a master's in finance and climate change from the college of London and job experience as a finance consultant for sustainability projects. 

As for Duro-Last, they also have a long history of sustainability. Tess explained, “Sustainability has been a priority for Duro-Last for a long time. The founder, John R. Burt, was the one who initiated the first sustainability programs in the company back in the 1980s.” That program was actually one of the first recycling programs and focused on keeping PVC material out of the landfill. Tess shared a bit about how recycling PVC works, saying, “The main way of recycling PVC is mechanically recycling it. So you'll shred, grind it and then separate materials and then re-extrude into a new product.”  

Since then, they have been continuing to build their sustainability initiatives using new technology and techniques. One example of this is the roof take-back program they run. Tess explained, “The roof take-back program has been around for the last 10 years. Because we've made a lot of investments in our recycling department and gained the technology to efficiently recycle large-scale amounts of our post-consumer material, we have been able to work more on gathering material from the field to recycle.” This type of circular product lifecycle is key to creating a sustainable roofing industry. Tess elaborated, “Not only has this allowed us to reduce the amount of virgin material that we're using, which has amazing impacts for the environment, there's also less work needed in the processes to create a new product. In other words, it’s far more efficient and less work to take PVC product and then bring it back into the life cycle than to get raw oil all the way to a finished PVC product.” 

Read the transcript or Listen to the entire episode to learn more about Duro-Last's roofing sustainability initiatives.