April 20, 2023 – IKO, a manufacturer of residential and commercial roofing products, has announced the full commissioning of its Asphalt Shingle Recycling (ARS) line in Hawkesbury, Ont.
The Hawkesbury location, one of IKO’s eight modern shingle manufacturing plants, is among the first shingle plants to graduate from its pilot phase into daily production.
Dan Horton, founding partner of ASR Systems, noted that “IKO is among the first asphalt shingle manufacturers in North America to achieve true circularity at one of its shingle plant locations with an in-line waste recycling process.”
In the current environment, a typical shingle recycling plant produces about 5,000 tons of recycled content per year, which is a fraction of the percentage of raw materials used annually by an average production facility. When IKO’s new line running reaches its capacity later this year, it is anticipated that the IKO RAS will be able to recycle up to 150 tons of shingle material per day.
According to the US EPA 2020, approximately 15 million tons of asphalt shingles are discarded annually, and 13 million tons were landfilled, and 2 million tons were recovered for further use as recently as 2018.