Better Roads Magazine, 13 November 2011
by Daniel C. Brown, Contributing Editor
The Economics of Recycling Roof Shingles into Asphalt Pavement
Everyone wants to be green until they see red, meaning we all want to recycle until it costs us money,” says Phil Hutchens, chairman of Missouri-based Hutchens Construction. “Recycling with roofing shingles in asphalt saves in two ways – it saves a product that would otherwise go to a landfill and it saves money.”
Since shingle recycling for pavements got started in the late 1990s, asphalt producers have increased the amount of recycled shingles to about a million tons per year, according to estimates by the National Asphalt Pavement Association. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that we still send 10 million tons of roofing shingles to landfills every year. A ton of shingles contains approximately 25-percent liquid asphalt. If you do the math, that means we waste 100,000 transport loads of asphalt binder every year.
When the costs of processing and handling shingles are considered, it often turns out that the liquid asphalt cement (AC) in those shingles is a bargain. Recycling a ton of shingles costs Hutchens’ company about $30. That covers handling, asbestos testing, grinding and so forth. It takes about four tons of shingles to make one ton of liquid AC. So if you multiply four tons times $30, you can acquire liquid AC for just $120 per ton. (That is an operating cost only.) Virgin AC can cost $500 a ton. “Plus you get 3 tons of sand from the shingles,” says Hutchens.