Rubber on the roof

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/08/2003 (8091 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LET’S say you were putting a new roof on your house. You want the look of cedar and the easy installation of asphalt, but you want it to have an endurance factor that neither of those products can offer, plus a maintenance factor of zero, and you didn’t want to feel like you were hurting the environment.

A few years ago, you would have been out of luck. But you can now accomplish all of that by, essentially, throwing old tires onto your roof.

Meet the modern roofing material that’s taking the cedar-dominated world of quality home roofing by storm. Called Enviroshake, the product is made entirely from recycled rubber. But don’t expect it to look that way: the shakes actually do bear a remarkable resemblance to cedar, and from below are almost impossible to differentiate. They even fade like cedar… but with a 50-year pro-rated warranty, they’ll never crack or warp like cedar roofs are susceptible to in as little as 15 years. Which is why the owners of luxury homes and vintage churches alike are choosing Enviroshake to replace their failing cedar roofs.

“If you’re talking cedar, they’ll tell you that there’s a 25-year warranty,” says Oakwood Roofing spokesman Greg Graham. “But the warranty is that it stays cedar. There is no real warranty on wood. A lot of roofs that we’re redoing now are pine that went rotten, so we’re redoing it with cedar. But now I can do it with this… because it hurts if you have to put a new $20,000 roof on every eight or nine years.”

The material, produced by Ontario-based Wellington Polymer Technology Inc., was first introduced to the market back in 1997, with a big splash: television programs and even the federal minister of agriculture bustled to sing its praises. And while customers might have been skeptical at first, after more and more projects began to be done with Enviroshake, they were soon convinced. After all, the shakes are tough: maintenance-free, they’re also resistant to mould, mildew, and insects, impervious to hail, and do not warp or blister.

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So what if it’s taken Manitoba a little while to hop on the bandwagon? Thanks to Graham, now any Manitoban can experience the advantages that Enviroshake has to offer. “This year, I was introduced to the product about one month before the Homes Show,” says Graham, who displayed the product at the convention. “We had an incredible amount of interest. With the future of this product, the sky’s the limit.”

With the City of Winnipeg recently giving the go-ahead for Enviroshake to be used as an equal to cedar, Graham is excited about offering his clients a material that will last for the lifetime of the home. Besides the clear environmental benefits — it even won the 2001 Canadian Award of Excellence for Innovation — Enviroshake is an easy sell. It even helps out Graham and his fellow roofers.

“Cedar comes with a certain amount of waste,” he says, pointing out that since wood is never uniform, cedar shakes are frequently unusable. Enviroshake, on the other hand, is a manufactured product, so every shake lives up to the same quality and standard. “Each piece is usable.”

Which makes the bottom line a little more affordable. While pricing with Enviroshake generally is slightly more expensive than cedar, early experiments suggest that because of the more efficient nature of the product, any discrepancies will balance out. “It costs more, but because you use less of it, the actual price is very, very little extra,” says Graham, referring to cedar’s higher wastage. “Depending on the size of the home, the average is only about $1,000 or more, which is very little when you consider the warranty. And it’s such an easy product. The shakes are all one foot wide, so when you’re applying, there’s an ease of application. So labour rates should come down, so it’ll even out.”

Graham makes no bones about the fact that Enviroshake is definitely a premium product. But there he cites another benefit to it: when you buy Enviroshake, you’re always getting the same thing. With cedar, for instance, the grading scale is done within each company, rather than being tightly regulated. So wood that is sold as #1 cedar can actually turn out to be something of far lower quality… which will increase its chances of failing. With Enviroshake, you know exactly what you’re getting.

With McDiarmid lumber handling distribution of the product, Graham notes that it will be widely accessible, with display units in the stores so that people can get to see Enviroshake’s unique qualities up close and personal. And as for Graham himself, Oakwood Roofing just completed their first Enviroshake project in Manitoba, on a home outside of Birds Hill.

For the couple who took the first plunge into the world of Enviroshake, Graham notes that the guarantee of never again having to replace the roof was a prime selling point… but hey, the comfort of living in a more environmentally responsible way must be pretty good, too.

“This product is 95 per cent good recycled product,” says Graham. “Sure, they made a shake out of it. But what else could be made out of it? I’m thinking they could make anything… it’s still a young company.”

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