Chemical Fabrics & Film Association, Vinyl Roofing Division
Introduction
For more than 50 years, durable, highly engineered, light-colored vinyl roofing membranes have cooled and protected buildings in climates around the world. Their long life cycle is a significant contributor to their excellent ratings by the American National Standard for assessing sustainability of single-ply roof membranes. To date, PVC materials are the only products to be rated gold or platinum to this standard. But it doesn’t stop there. Vinyl or PVC is the only commercial roofing material that is being recycled at the end of decades of service life into the feedstock to make new roofing membranes.
PVC has an inherent advantage over many other roofing materials when it comes to recycling. As a thermoplastic, it can readily be heated and reprocessed without loss of key physical properties. Thus, it has long been an industry best practice to reintroduce production trimmings and scrap as a raw material into vinyl roofing membrane manufacturing processes. Some roofing manufacturers even collect and process their customers’ scrap as well as the general
purpose scrap of other vinyl fabricators. In 2021, the member manufacturers of the Chemical Fabrics & Film Association (CFFA) Vinyl Roofing Division recycled a combined 20.5 million pounds of pre-consumer materials. Read more.
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