Low-Slope Roofing:
Prospects Looking Up

From an environmental standpoint, the low-slope roofing on commercial and industrial buildings is a big problem. (“Low-slope” roofing is often incorrectly called flat roofing—it nearly always has a slight pitch). For starters, there is a lot of it. No one in the industry seems to know how much low-slope roofing exists in the United States, but back-of-the-envelope calculations by EBN indicate that the nation’s 4.8 million commercial buildings (not including industrial or agricultural buildings) have on the order of 1,400 square miles (3,600 km²) of roofing (mostly low-slope), an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. In the U.S., we spend $13 billion dollars a year on commercial roofing (1996 data), 75% of that on reroofing and 25% on new construction.
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