Green Roofing Grows in Popularity

With Southern California's lethargic housing market, builders are doing what they can to make their developments stand out to buyers. KPCC Orange County Reporter Susan Valot says some are doing that by topping their homes with "green" roofing.

Susan Valot: Victoria Sharples watches as workers slip two by four foot roofing panels into place at her home in Brea. The finished product is something that only Barbie dreamed of a couple of decades ago – a plastic roof. Well, actually part plastic. It's called polymer roofing.

Frank Lane: The material actually has over 40 years of proven weatherability. It's used on camper shells, boat hulls, on the bumper of your car. So it's been used in many different types of products.

Valot: But Frank Lane, CEO of ArmorLite Roofing, says it's just starting to take off in the roofing industry. Lane says polymer roofing weighs only a fraction of what traditional roofing weighs. It's environmentally-friendly, too.

Lane: It uses the least amount of the Earth's resources. It also is a 100% recyclable, it has recycled material in it, and it uses the least amount of energy to manufacture, and the least amount of energy to transport of any roofing product.

Valot: Homeowner Victoria Sharples, who edits a roofing trade publication, says it took her several years of research to choose this roof. She was sold on polymer's indestructibility, even though it costs about a third more than traditional asphalt shingles.

Victoria Sharples: Most roofing products – not most, but a majority of them – you have to be careful how you walk on them. You can walk on any pretty much any roof, if you do it correctly. But the big cloddy painter doesn't know how to do it correctly, or the cable man doesn't do it correctly, so then we have breakage on the roof. And this, you can jump up and down.

Valot: Or you can hit the panel with a hammer and it just flexes. Another thing it nails? The attention of neighbors. Sharples says it makes her home look like a different house, topped with a gleaming roof.

Sharples: You know, with these tract home neighborhoods that we all have, my house, you drive down the street, you go, "Whoa! What's that?"

Valot: It's that kind of reaction that builders are looking for, especially in a sluggish housing market. Joe Schiarra founded ArmorLite Roofing, which builders are using on several developments around Southern California.

Joe Schiarra: They want to set their project aside from everybody else's. Because the way the market is in homes today, it's a little different market than it was, you know, a year or two years ago. So they're trying to find their niche, how can they take their project and make people want to come and see it and spend a little bit more or purchase their homes, compared to the project down the street.

Valot: Tom Bollnow of the National Roofing Contractors Association agrees synthetic roofing, which includes polymer roofing, is getting more popular. But he says the materials haven't been around long enough to make "sound" judgments about how long they'll last. ArmorLite claims it'll last you a lifetime, 50 to 75 years or more. But Bollnow says estimates on such new products are based on accelerated weather testing, not nature itself. Plus, there are no set standards.

Tom Bollnow: Unfortunately with the synthetics, they don't have any prescribed test protocol for them to go through. They test the materials to, to standards and testing procedures that are, are generally used for, I'll say similar materials. And that's the best they can do.

Valot: Bollnow says no single polymer product has jumped out as being "revolutionary" over another. He says a polymer is a polymer is a polymer, no matter who makes it. The roofing technology expert says he's skeptical when it comes to new types of roofing.

Bollnow: I've spent 40-plus years in the roofing business and I've seen innumerable products brought into the marketplace and, with claims of high performance and that type of thing, only to have them fail the test of time, if you will.

Valot: Bollnow says the National Roofing Contractors Association is already getting lots of calls from consumers asking about polymer roofing. Some complain their synthetic roofs aren't holding up as well as they expected in hail and severe weather. Roofing expert Tom Bollnow says we don't know if polymer will mold the future of the roofing industry. He says it's going to take more time to nail that down.