Andersen's Brandon Berg talks with Green Builder Media's Sara Gutterman at VISION House Austin about how window and door design drives long-term durability and performance in increasingly extreme climates. He also describes the company's push toward supply chain resilience, regional manufacturing, recycled content, and finding new uses for manufacturing and replacement-window waste.
00:00:02:08 - 00:00:25:29
Sara Gutterman: We are here today to talk about the vision House Boston, which is an architect design home that we are collaborating on. This is a unique project because it's really intended to showcase how sustainability begins with design. It is addressing climate responsive design. So talk a little bit about how Anderson's products contribute to sustainability of the design phase.
00:00:26:02 - 00:00:59:03
Brandon Berg: What do you think about sustainability and Windows and Doors? A lot of times we're talking about recycled content and other things that happen after the fact, but the design of the building is is critical and in particular our products. We put a lot of emphasis on air and water performance and long term performance of this. And so when we think about sustainable designs, making sure that they're installed properly, that that they are easy to install, the performance is not only at day one, but at year ten and at year 15 and year 20.
00:00:59:04 - 00:01:14:07
Brandon Berg: That's a really important thing. So when we think about sustainability and our design of our products, we think our products are uniquely focused and positioned on long term performance and durability, which over the lifetime of a building makes a huge impact on its impact on the world.
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Sara Gutterman: Talk a little bit about how your products specifically address climate responsiveness, but then also how your business is ensuring resiliency.
00:01:23:16 - 00:01:50:28
Brandon Berg: We think about that a couple of different ways. When maybe. First of all, I would say our products and we understand and are anticipating that our products are going to be in more extreme environments, whether that's, you know, higher, higher amounts of hurricane events or just more extremes. And so on that side of the things, the way our products are used, if you were to come to our R\&D center, you get to see how we do a lot of simulation of very high temperature extremes and UV extremes.
00:01:50:29 - 00:02:14:03
Brandon Berg: The original purpose for that is to try to accelerate light prediction of products, but it actually set us up so that we have a really good sense of how our products perform in more extreme environments. And we have a long history of that from the sourcing side of things. And how are we responded to climate? There's really a supply chain crisis that we all went through several years ago.
00:02:14:05 - 00:02:40:20
Brandon Berg: I guess four years ago now, 3 to 4 years ago, really taught us some pretty tough lessons of our own resiliency of your supply chain, and that we have since really spent we spent a lot of time in our company to build a more resilient supply chain. And by doing that, we have done things to respond to things like wildfire risks in the western part of the United States and Canada.
00:02:40:25 - 00:03:10:20
Brandon Berg: We were responding to, you know, certain products are much more have a much bigger impact on the world than climate when they when you ship them across the ocean. And that ultimately leads to a more resilient business and a more resilient supply chain. But there are opportunities when you're doing that to to also be thinking about and integrating the, you know, different circularity concepts and other types of climate, climate change related impacts.
00:03:10:23 - 00:03:23:12
Sara Gutterman: Now, you mentioned the word circularity. Are you incorporating circularity into your manufacturing processes? Are you looking at developing take back programs or do you have any in place already? Talk a little bit more about.
00:03:23:12 - 00:03:44:14
Brandon Berg: That pretty quickly actually moving into much more of a regional based manufacturing footprint. We've announced we have sort of a plant west side of Phoenix. We just announced we're going to start up another plant southern south of Atlanta. Part of that is to certainly go after business opportunities, but a lot of it also is a circularity. And we're minimizing our shipping and impacts of the world.
00:03:44:16 - 00:04:07:17
Brandon Berg: The other thing on circularity is we have a long history of using recycled materials in our products. You know, very well documented, very public out there, and everything from the recycling of different wood components to vinyl components to other plastic components. And we're continuing to push the limits of that. We're also actively working on. Again, no matter what you do in manufacturing, you're going to have some amount of waste.
00:04:07:18 - 00:04:30:17
Brandon Berg: What can you do with that waste? So we're putting it into a back at our products. We're also working with several partners across the building product space to use our waste to provide everything from fillers to heat sources and other things to for them to make their products. Over half the industry is about replacement and remodel, so every window we like to talk about, every window we make, we get one back.
00:04:30:23 - 00:05:02:11
Brandon Berg: It's 100% return business. And so what can you do with that return? And there's more and more outlets for that. And we are we're putting a lot of focus on that up until including our we have a corporate venture capital group inside of our company that works on investing in startup companies. And we have made a lot of different, a lot of progress with companies that are trying to figure out a way to build a business around this idea of of building product waste and particular window and door ways to provide feedstock into the, into their products.