Many Kansas City homeowners probably do not realize how close they are to a valuable resource. The Pink Hill Acres Demolition Landfill in Blue Springs accepts asphalt shingles for recycling. This is a very good thing. The typical house can yield three to four tons of raw product for shingle recycling. This includes the nails, since large powerful magnets usually separate the nails from the shredded shingles.
How Shingles are Recycled
At Pink Hill Acres and similar operations, roofers bring tons of fiberglass-asphalt shingles for shredding and recycling. Instead of being buried, this valuable resource is shredded using large shredding hammermills or rotating anvil choppers. These giant machines, hypnotic to watch, take shingles, underlayment, and nails and pulverize everything into granules. Magnets pull the nails from the material and send them to a container for metal recycling.
Many of these brute-force machines are portable, allowing recycling companies to move them around Missouri and Kansas to tap the available “raw materials,” the old shingles off homeowners’ roofs. The conveyor belts carrying the granulated material can deposit it in easily transported containers, or simply drop it on the ground for scooping up with front end loaders. This granulated material can be added to manufacturing processes, principally related to road-building.
Where Recycled Shingles Reappear
The roads you drive upon, the energy you consume, and the new shingles capping your Kansas City home can all benefit from shingle recycling. Most reuse applications involve roads:
- Hot mix asphalt
- Cold patch
- Temporary roads
- Aggregate road base
The Asphalt Roof Manufacturing Association encourages conscientious roofers, such as Bill West Roofing, to practice shingle recycling. Not only does it hold down costs, it recovers a valuable resource—fossil fuel—from disappearing into landfills.
Bill West Recycles
Our company is proud of its tradition of green roofing. We carefully remove your home’s old asphalt shingles and put them in a special container for recycling. We can take them to one of several convenient recycling centers, not just Pink Hill Acres. Generally, recycling is cheaper than landfill; plus, we like knowing we are helping to protect the environment.
At Bill West Roofing, we care for the environment as much as we care for your roof. Whether you contact us for more information about shingle recycling or roof repair, we are here to serve you.