Fabral vice president of sales Bruce Green tells Sara Gutterman why metal roofing fits Green Builder Media's VISION House Austin: panels made largely from recycled steel and fully recyclable again, standing-seam attachment systems engineered for wind, hail, and ice, and reflective coatings that bounce heat away instead of absorbing it. He also describes how the company tightens its supply chain and sources locally to cut freight.
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Sara Gutterman: Hi, I'm Sarah Gutterman, CEO of Green Builder Media, and I'm here today with Bruce Green, vice president of sales from Bob Roth. So we are going to talk today about the vision House Austin, which is a unique architect designed home in Green Builder Media's Vision House series that is intended to showcase climate responsive design. And that sustainability really begins with design.
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Sara Gutterman: So talk a little bit about Bob browse products. You're kind of the first line of defense with respect to having climate response responsiveness within the home.
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Bruce Green: And really nothing lends itself better to that than a metal roof. If you think about a metal roof, it's primarily composed or created from recycled material. The biggest portion of the metal, the largest percentage, is from recycled materials. So the resources that you would use in a mining operation or in a steel production operation, you don't have to use, it's already been done.
00:01:04:02 - 00:01:34:21
Bruce Green: Additionally, at the end of its life cycle, it can all be recycled again. So you can use it again and again. It's a it's a it's a wonderful material for that. But when you're looking specifically at a roof, especially the one that you're building in Austin, the primarily concern is the heat. It gets hot in Austin. So you want to be able to reflect as much of that heat as you can, a regular asphalt shingle roof or some of the other roofs like the pitch roofs.
00:01:34:23 - 00:01:46:08
Bruce Green: They absorb heat and they hold it. If you use a metal roof and you get a reflective coating, most of the heat is then reflected away from your roof, making it a lot easier to cool your project.
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Sara Gutterman: So, Bruce, you just touched on three really important elements that I want to dive a little bit deeper into. First is, the the recycled materials utilized in your roofs. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
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Bruce Green: It's much easier if you have an operation that takes, the scrap that we create. We can take all of that and then melt it and create new parts with it. So we didn't have to go mined the iron ore environmentally. Making steel is not necessarily the best thing because of the smoke and everything that comes from that.
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Bruce Green: It's much better if we can use recycled materials. It's just easier and better for the environment. It's cheaper. Plus, you're not wasteful.
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Sara Gutterman: In terms of, metal roofs and their ability to withstand these catastrophic events, whether those are wildfires or, super storms or, hurricanes. Can you talk a little bit about, that aspect of resiliency in metal roofing?
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Bruce Green: You think about them as just the panels, but there's far more to that. How do you attach the panels to the structure? If you look at a traditional metal panel and everybody thinks about, running a fashion or through the panel into the substrate to hold the roof on, but on metal roofs. Now we had standing seam metal roofs where you do not create any hole in the envelope of the building.
00:03:11:05 - 00:03:37:22
Bruce Green: They use cliffs, and then the clips attach to the panels to hold them up. There's no better way to keep the water off the children than a trapezoidal standing seam metal roof. Now, when these roofs get big, they expand and contract with the heat. There's going to be what we call thermal movement, and we actually use clips that articulate that move back and forth and up and down to take care of that ability for the panel to move.
00:03:37:24 - 00:03:57:11
Bruce Green: You think that a metal roof, when the wind blows, it comes under it and pushes it off, but that's not what happens when it blows over it. It creates a suction and pulls it off. How do we mitigate that? So we tested different clips, different attachments, and different levels of how far apart we would put the roof purlins to make sure we didn't do that.
00:03:57:13 - 00:04:18:19
Bruce Green: And the roofs changed from 1992 to now that we systems are much more. They, they go through a wind event like that much better than they used to. Think about the durability during a hailstorm or the durability in a big ice event, or a big rain event. There's nothing that can withstand the elements as well as the metal.
00:04:18:21 - 00:04:28:04
Sara Gutterman: Bruce, I know on the Austin project, we're going to be using some, cool roof systems and reflective coatings and things like that. So can you talk a little bit about those?
00:04:28:06 - 00:04:54:22
Bruce Green: I think they're coated with what we call Galva Loom, which is a mixture of zinc and aluminum. As long as they're not affected by outside influences like chemicals or some kind of something like that. These roofs will last for 40 or 50 years. That's where the beer Goblin works. So if you take that gamble and works, and now you put a coating on it and you put a of what you just talked about, the reflective coating, we have to reflect more of the heat instead of absorbing it.
00:04:54:25 - 00:05:18:24
Bruce Green: So there's no there's no other roofing, materials that you can use that will reflect the heat in your house. And Austin, as I was reading the design criteria the other day, when I was reading about it, they had the highly reflective blades, and then to have the space between the roof and the ceiling, like this shaded area, that's going to make so much difference in keeping that house cool.
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Bruce Green: That's a wonderful design.
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Sara Gutterman: We really enjoyed working with Peter Phifer, who is considered to be one of the early pioneers of sustainable design, here in the US. He's been doing this for a long, long time. And, he really recognizes just those types of practices can make such a big difference on the performance of a home, the comfort of the home, you know, and really being able to be climate responsive now.
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Sara Gutterman: How is fibro making your company climate responsive, not just your products.
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Bruce Green: Well, it's something we think about all the time when we're building out our supply chain, that we are making sure that we don't make unnecessary truck lines, that we make sure that the load or, that we can source as much as we can locally, and that if we do have to move material, that the trucks are full, and always looking for better ways to get all of the parts that you need for a metal building, they're without generating any more loads than we can.
00:06:18:03 - 00:06:47:02
Bruce Green: And it's not just it's not just in order for us to not spend the money on the truck. That's what you need for what company, of course, wants to do that. But it's bigger than that. We're all very aware that the Earth is getting hotter, and that we all have to do our part to look at things like that, to minimize the effect, to get closer to our customer, to get closer to the markets, to make sure we're all doing everything we can to minimize the impact we have by moving steel around the country and.