![]() “Things that we said won’t work in the past, we’re now spending more time proving or disproving whether they might be viable,” Turner told us. Armstrong has already started reaching out to other potential local collaborators. The partnership has also highlighted the benefit of looking locally for solutions, thus reducing transportation costs and associated emissions. So to locally find 15 percent of our paper needs in a sustainable lifetime partnership type of deal, it’s definitely worth it financially and for the long term.” The partnership also helps Irving reach its own sustainability and circularity goals in reducing waste-to-landfill and giving its raw materials another life. "Armstrong has to find alternate supplies. “Bottom line is that paper sources are drying up and the world is going digital,” Turner told TriplePundit. But despite the upfront investment required to test and verify the materials, Armstrong sees the partnership as a win-win. It took about a year of testing to incorporate the new material, both in Armstrong’s corporate headquarters and locally in Macon. It’s the right location to make it viable.” “It’s the right amount of material to justify it on our end. “Procurement’s never gone after a fiber stream like this because it’s never been in the scope of Armstrong raw materials,” Turner explained. Shipping across long distances is not a viable option, as the fiber would quickly dry out, but the two plants being less than three miles apart allows for fast shipping while the fiber is still usable. Irving’s fiber has a high moisture content, a necessary feature in the type of filler Armstrong requires in its tiles. One reason this particular partnership works is proximity. The companies estimate they will divert more than 3,500 tons of fiber waste annually from landfills through the partnership, while lowering costs and making their production processes more efficient. “We did some initial exploration with Irving and quickly realized that the paper was pretty clean.” After touring Irving’s treatment plant, he added, “We were pretty excited, and we thought it would be a viable fiber replacement for our current process.” “Historically, we never used a waste stream like that,” Braden Turner, value stream improvement champion at Armstrong, told TriplePundit. The Irving employee returned to his former employer at Armstrong and floated the idea of using Irving’s waste in Armstrong’s ceiling tiles. ![]() A byproduct of the milling process is fiber that cannot be used in its consumer products. Irving pulps wood at its mills in Canada and ships the dried wood pulp to its Macon plant to make tissues and paper towels. For decades, the company used wood fibers as a bonding element in the tiles, but in the 1980s it switched to using baled recycled paper, like phone books and newsprint. ![]() The partnership centers on one of Armstrong’s signature products, ceiling tiles. The partnership represents a synergy between the two companies and came about organically through a former Armstrong employee who later worked at Irving and first floated the idea of using Irving’s waste in Armstrong’s ceiling tiles. Two corporate neighbors come together to reduce environmental impactĮarlier this year, the ceiling and wall solutions company Armstrong World Industries and Irving Consumer Products, a household paper products manufacturer, entered into a partnership at their respective Macon, Georgia, facilities to enable both companies to address their local environmental impacts. But a new hyper-local partnership is looking to move one step closer to increasing the circularity of the buildings and construction industry. But the reality is that buildings comprise around 40 percent of global carbon emissions, much of it embodied in the building materials themselves. When you enter a building, you probably don’t think much about what it took to build it.
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