IKO commissions Hawkesbury, Ontario, asphalt shingle recycling line

IKO Industries Inc., a manufacturer of residential and commercial roofing products that is headquartered in Brampton, Ontario; Wilmington, Delaware; and Antwerp, Belgium, has announced the full commissioning of its asphalt shingle recycling line in Hawkesbury, Ontario. The company also recently began the pilot phase of a thermoplastic polyolefin (TPO) recycling line in its Hagerstown, Maryland, plant that opened in 2022.

The Hawkesbury location is one of eight shingle manufacturing plants under IKO’s umbrella, and the company says it is among the first shingle plants in the world to graduate from its pilot phase into daily production. Planning for the two-story, 28,000-square-foot recycled asphalt shingles (RAS) facility began in late 2019, and after several pandemic-related delays, the project broke ground in 2021 and was constructed in phases until completion in the fall of 2022.

Dan Horton, founding partner of San Antonio-based shingle recycling system developer ASR Systems, which served as IKO’s partner in the project, says, “IKO is among the first asphalt shingle manufacturers in North America to achieve true circularity at one of its shingle plant locations with an inline waste recycling process. It is also the first manufacturer, to my knowledge, that has developed a commercialized shingle recycling center that reuses the recycled raw material output in the production of new shingles.”

According to IKO, a typical shingle recycling plant produces about 5,000 tons of recycled content per year, which is a small percentage of the raw materials used annually by an average production facility. With its new line running daily, the company says it is exceeding those benchmarks by a wide margin.

The company also cites Environmental Protection Agency data from 2020 claiming approximately 15 million tons of asphalt shingles are discarded annually, 13 million tons were landfilled and 2 million tons were recovered for further use as recently as 2018.

When it reaches its capacity later this year, IKO says its RAS will be able to recycle up to 150 tons of shingle material per day.

“The first significant step towards reducing shingle-related disposal in landfills is our goal to achieve zero percent waste at every plant location,” IKO CEO David Koschitzky says. “We are well on our way to achieve this objective at our Hawkesbury facility, and we will use what we learned from this effort to rapidly innovate even more efficient lines at both IKO Hagerstown and at each of our shingle plants in the coming years.”

The Hagerstown TPO facility employs technology allowing its team to recover and reuse all of the plant’s postindustrial raw material scrap, including polyester scrim.

“We’re just getting started, but already we’re learning how to gain greater efficiencies from the process,” Hagerstown Plant Manager Edgard Leite says of the new recycling line. “We are eager to realize our goal of reutilizing all our raw material waste.”

Established in 1951, IKO operates in the roofing, waterproofing and insulation industry for residential and commercial markets and has more than 35 manufacturing plants throughout North America and Europe.