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Advertising supplement provided by Owens Corning

Verifying Recycled Content — Claims for recycled content vary widely from about 25 percent up to 90 percent or more. That sounds good, but have the numbers been certified by an independent testing body?

One company specializing in such work is Scientific Certification Systems (SCS), established in 1984 as the nation’s first third-party certifier for pesticide residue in fresh produce. Since then the company has become a certifier of multiple facets of the food industry, forest management, marine habitats and manufacturing-related businesses.

The company’s environmental division certifies claims related to environmental achievement in product manufacturing such as recycled content and biodegradability. If you can’t find SCS certification in the product’s literature or on its packaging, you can check the list of certified products on the SCS website: www.scscertified.com

Recycle-ability – It should also be pointed out here that some insulation products themselves are recyclable. For example, extruded polystyrene foam insulation used in protected roof membrane assemblies can be picked up and used again when the time comes to replace the roof membrane underneath the insulation.

A recent example of this took place at DFW Airport in Texas. When the time came to replace membranes in insulated and ballasted roofing assemblies on the terminal buildings, the airport’s roof manager looked for insulation under the rock ballast already on the roofs. What he found was perfectly usable extruded polystyrene insulation made more than 17 years ago.

After sending insulation samples to a laboratory to verify R-value and compressive strength, the consultant designed the re-roofing projects to re-use as much of the existing insulation as possible. The roofing contractor was able to pick up and reuse nearly 90 percent of the old material, saving the airport thousands of dollars that would have been spent taking the old material to a landfill and replacing it with all new insulation. Labor for getting the old insulation off the roof and new material up there would have added thousands of dollars to the project.

There are also environmental benefits to consider — less material to the landfill and less fossil fuel consumed in raw materials and manufacturing the new insulation. During the past 17+ years, the insulation has saved countless amounts of coal, oil, gas and electricity from being consumed, and it also helped avoid the creation of greenhouse gas emissions in making and consuming the energy to heat and cool the terminals. The insulation is now back in place to go on saving energy for another 17 or more years.