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THE ONLY SOURCE FOR PROFESSIONAL ICI ROOFING CONTRACTORS IN ONTARIO
 
ONTARIO ROOFING NEWS – ISSUE 1 2026 
13
Roof Restoration
Advancing Sustainable 
Roof Restoration: 
The following article originally 
appeared in the December 2025 issue 
of Interface. It is reprinted here with 
permission from the International 
Institute of Building Enclosure Con-
sultants (IIBEC).
W
hile the building industry’s 
sustainability discourse 
has increasingly focused 
on new construction, a significant 
opportunity lies quietly in the vast 
inventory of existing buildings. 
Roof re-covering – which focuses on 
membrane replacement rather than 
full-system tear-off and replacement 
– is a well-established strategy for 
extending roof life and reducing 
waste. The authors aimed to take 
this approach further by integrating 
detailed 
embodied 
carbon 
Enhancing roof re-covers with embodied carbon 
analysis and innovative material choices
By Milirsan Pugalendiran, RRO, P.Eng., and Michelle Christopherson, DipT, ENV SP 
calculations and optimizing material 
selection to maximize environmental 
and economic benefits.
Large-scale industrial or ware-
house buildings were prime candi-
dates (Fig. 1) to explore optimized 
roof re-covering strategies. These 
roof-centric assets have long service 
lives, but their roofs have relatively 
short service lives, with roof replace-
ments or renewals required roughly 
every 20 years (depending on the 
membrane 
system). 
Traditional 
practices often default to full-roof 
replacement, resulting in disposal 
of large volumes of otherwise ser-
viceable insulation and cover board 
materials, and the associated envi-
ronmental impact. The enhanced 
roof re-covering methodology chal-
lenges this assumption by focusing 

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