Myth vs. Reality: What Manufacturers Won't Tell You - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Jason Stanley of IB Roof Systems. You can read the interview below, listen to the podcast or watch the recording.

Intro: Welcome everybody to this Read Listen Watch from RoofersCoffeeShop. This is going to be a really great conversation. We're going to be talking myth versus reality and what manufacturers won't tell you. And we're getting this presentation from Jason Stanley of IB Roof System, a manufacturer who's going to tell you the truth today. 

Jason, welcome. I'm really glad that you're here. Before we introduce yourself, I do want to tell everybody that this is going to be available on demand on RoofersCoffeeShop in about one to two days, so definitely by Friday, because you're going to want to share this message with a lot of your colleagues in the industry. So Jason, please introduce yourself. Tell us about you.

Jason Stanley: Well, thank you. Happy to be here. I've been in this industry most of my adult life. I'm currently serving on the board of directors for the National Roofing Contractors Association and Roofing Alliance. I'm the CEO for IB Roof Systems. We make PVC single ply, and single ply is near and dear to my heart and to my family. It's what we've done for most of our lives here, 40 plus years here at IB Roof Systems.

And there's some new stuff coming out that I feel that needs to be addressed and met head on, and there seems to be a whole lot of confusion in the marketplace right now with some dangerous concepts around wide withdrawal. So thank you for the time. Certainly excited to be here and share a message with team.

Karen Edwards: Looking forward to it. So before we get into that topic itself, let's talk a little bit about the history of commercial roofing rolls, because they've been around a long time.

Jason Stanley: Yeah, things have changed quite a bit, right? If you go back 40 years, we used to manufacture roofs on a job site. I mean, literally a combination of hot tar or asphalt and felt. And how thick or how thin, and how close you put your plies together, you physically manufactured a roof on site.

In later years, we started finding ways to manufacture the roof system in a plant where we had a more controlled environment, whether it's mod bed, APP, SBS, EPDM, TPO, PVC, even hypalons in some early days were all products that then became pre-engineered or pre-manufactured. And the limit of the contractor was really screwing or gluing that particular product down and then welding the seams.

That trend seemed to exist for some time where we used rolls that were three feet and six feet for several decades. And it was only in the last decade that suddenly, these rolls grew from three feet and six feet to suddenly 10, 12 and now 16 feet. And the roll weights also changed from 50 pounds and 100 pounds historically to then 200 pounds, 400 pounds, 600 pounds plus.

Karen Edwards: That's a lot of weight. So let's look at some of the myths that have are out there about wide rolls.

Jason Stanley: Yeah, it's kind of crazy, right? People are talking about this enormous labor savings, and I guess on the surface it makes a lot of sense, right? There's a saying that's been thrown around at nauseam, 40% fewer seams 40% faster. And then there is this belief that if you have 100 rolls on a truck versus 200 rolls on a truck, well, I need fewer trucks. And if I have fewer rolls to lift on a roof, well then I have less crane time.

Well, let's unpack those just a little bit. I'm finding as you dig deeper, you're going to get the same amount of weight on a truck. It doesn't matter if it's 100 small rolls or 100 big rolls or 200 small rolls, it's all the same amount of square footage or weight that you're going to get on a truck.

And then when you start looking at lifting with a crane, there's twice as many rolls with these traditional rolls, so I'm going to have twice as many lifts. The reality is you're going to be lifting two small rolls versus one heavy roll. It's typically based on the load capacity of the crane and what you can actually set on the deck at one particular time. 

So as you start unpacking these things of there's fewer trucks, no, it's actually the same. Oh, there's fewer lifts with a crane. No, that's actually the same as well because it's a function of how much you can lift and then how much you can set down.

And then as you start unpacking the labor piece, it gets a little more complex. I think we need to go to the next slide, actually digs into this just a little bit more.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, these are the facts, right? And I know you all are going to have questions out there, so feel free to submit them because we will do a Q&A at the end.

Jason Stanley: Well, I certainly had questions too. In fact, when I first saw an article that had a contractor holding a 12-foot roll, I believe it was on the front of Professional Roofing magazine or a contractor, Roofing Contractor magazine. There was a contractor holding a roll. It was literally 12 feet tall. It must've weighed 550 pounds, and had the headline, "40% fewer seams, 40% faster." And I took that magazine and I went and slapped it on Philip David's desk, who was my VP of technical at the time. And I said, "If this is true, we need to change."

And it was at that time that we took my CFO Philip David, and we went into a conference room and we literally scratched out every configuration or route you could do. An oval, a rectangle, a square, even a U-shaped building. And lo and behold, it was true.

There are 40% fewer seams. And that night when I went home, I thought, "Oh my goodness, we're going to have to change our manufacturing methodology or manufacturing practice. You have to go to an extrusion manufacturing process to get to those type of widths." And I remember having a pretty terrible feeling in my gut that night. The next day I got up and I happened to be meeting a tech guy. We were doing a job walk on a project. And what typically happens, lo and behold, we're sitting there in the parking lot waiting and guess what? They're not ready. And so you watch two truckloads of insulation, one truckload of cover board and one truckload of memory and accessories slowly get loaded onto the roof. You see them set up their safety lines and their ladders. And I start thinking, "Huh, with these wide width rolls, do they load the insulation any faster? Do they load the cover board any faster? Doesn't save them any time loading the membrane and accessories. Those are all the same." Do they save any time in setting up safety and the ladders? No. Those are all things that are true, whether you're using traditional rolls or whether you're using wide width rolls. 

So as you start to unpack this, we got up onto the job site a few hours later and they start laying out the poly iso and I start thinking, "Huh, there's no savings when you're laying out poly iso and there's no savings in the cover board. What about the walls? Those are the same, the curbs, the pipes, the drains." Every aspect of the roof is completely unchanged with the exception of one, and that is the welding of the seams.

Well, if you've been on a rooftop, you know how fast a welder goes. It's typically on average, maybe 14, 15 feet a minute. So start doing the math. On a 200 square project or a 20,000 square foot building, that is 700 additional lineal feet of seams. Now, that sounds like a lot, right? But at 14 feet per minute, that takes about 45 minutes for one guy. 
So 40% fewer seams, how is that 40% faster? Maybe in one variable. But in total of the job, if you've got a 200 square project and you've got a crew of six guys, the labor savings in welding is 45 minutes for one guy. 

But then if you unpack this a little bit further, in traditional wind uplift design, traditional rolls have always been mechanically attached at 12 inches on center or 18 inches on center. With these wide width rolls, you're almost always, with different wind designs and different substrates, almost always at six inches on center.

So if you do the math on the additional seams or the fewer seams you get with these wide width rolls, but the narrower fastening pattern, you actually use 25% more fasteners. So if you do the labor trial on installing 25% more fasteners, you spend two man-hours more putting in the additional fasteners into the seam. 

So it begs the question that, are these rolls really any faster? You're going to say, add two extra hours of fastening screws and plates to save one hour of welding. Wow, that doesn't seem like we're coming ahead really at all. And the risk that comes with all this is it's still not even addressing the material handling component of this thing. That's just the screwing and the welding. If you want to just keep it to that parallel, there's no benefit at all.

Now, some people will say an induction welded system like IsoFast or RhinoBond or others, that you don't have that particular fastening discrepancy, which is true. And in fully adhered applications, you don't have that either. You're going to fully adhere them all the same.

But you're still not addressing the material handling. A traditional roll weighs less than 200 pounds, and these rolls are weighing 450, 550 or 600 plus pounds and they require way more material handling from the people on the roof to move them around and adjust them. And whatever small amount of labor savings you had in the welding, 45 minutes per 200 squares is absolutely destroyed or eaten up an additional labor cost in the material handling of this alone.

Karen Edwards: Wow, just hearing those, do the math and think through, it really might not be that much different. And I think you expanded about it not being safe. How do you move these big rolls around the roof?

Jason Stanley: Well, lots of guys. I get comments on LinkedIn all the time when I post about this, "We have cranes for that. Well, we have lifts for that. We have dollies for that." I tell you, I've watched this 100 times. You're on a roof and these rolls are 100 feet long. You start rolling them out and the cart is quickly 50 yards or 50 feet away from you, and the contractors simply don't get up and walk away 50 feet away to go get a cart to bring it over to then do the lift.

And in some areas, these are terribly challenging to get around. You can have skylights. With a phenomenon of a lot of daylighting today, you see a lot more skylights on a project today than we maybe used to 15 or 20 years ago. The days of having just a wide open roof that doesn't have pipe penetrations, isn't set up for solar, doesn't have daylighting skylights. It is really not the reality of the roofs we deal with today. And trying to move these carts around move these rolls around with carts can be tough.

We also see different elevations on a roof as well. And the crane may be able to reach the first elevation, but maybe can't reach all the way into the interior where another building that's just a little higher or maybe an equipment well that's down lower. And they're trying to move these behemoth rolls, 500, 600 pound up onto another story, interior of the building or down into an equipment well. And it's down and dangerous.

Karen Edwards: And you might be thinking, "Well, of course he's going to say that," because you don't have those wide width rolls. But this has been really studied, and I want you to talk about this case study that was performed by Colin Murphy, who I was not familiar with Colin, but he is pretty much all the godfather of thermoplastics, right?

Jason Stanley: He is. He started bringing thermoplastics here in the United States 50 years ago. He was either the author or was on the board that authored many of the ASTM Standards that we all have today for thermoplastics. So he truly was one of the pioneers. And at the grassroots of it.

I had a meeting, it was at an IIBEC conference and I was meeting with Colin Murphy and I was bemoaning the industry moving to these wide width rolls, which would require us the change to a new manufacturing methodology of extrusion. 
Colin said, "Well you know it's not true, right?" I said, "Colin, I know it's not true, but the industry has just bought this hook line and sinker and these manufacturers have just repeated this message over and over again. This just become knowledge that they just truly believe it." And he said, "I can prove it." I said, "Wow, that'd be great."

He goes, "We just finished up a 42 project, two year study on labor efficiencies on a job site and they were studying everything from where you take your lunch breaks, to shaded areas on a roof, to porta potties on the roof or on the ground," and studying all the aspects of this. But one piece of the study as well was traditional width rolls versus wide width rolls, and they had all the studies related to it. 

And so Colin then set out to write a white paper that was then peer reviewed by IIBEC's board and then published an Interface Magazine in June. And what was quite remarkable is it went to the peer review committee and immediately got bounced back. And one of the first comments on the peer review was, "I think you've got it wrong. It says traditional width rolls are faster than the wide width rolls." And Colin said, "Yeah, that's the point of the whole paper." The whole industry has just bought into this so much so that they just believe it's true. 

But the facts are, if you'll read the white paper, I challenge anybody to go and read Colin's study. Again, a two-year study across 42 projects and then peer reviewed and then ultimately published in Interface Magazine this January of this year, 2024. It will show you that traditional width rolls are 23% faster, meaning they use 23% less labor to install what we've historically done, which is a safer roll for contractors to maneuver, to handle. There's a reason why these rolls have been sized this way for so many years. And just because they've gotten bigger, that doesn't mean it's some great innovation. We seem to be coming up with a lot of solutions to try and manage these rolls, but those solutions only make sense if there's actually a value to having them.

Karen Edwards: Good point. Yes. So we're going to look at next some examples of what can happen on the roof with wide width.

Jason Stanley: So as you may understand, roofing is dangerous. And we always think of falling, falling over the outside of a building. But we don't always think about falling through a building. And we talk about widow-maker skylights, and a few other dangers on a roof or sometimes a rotten deck or a rusted steel substrate. 

But in many cases, these rolls, the way they're set up, they're very wide. Some cases, 12 or even 16 feet. Requires you to stage your materials off to the side, sometimes creating clusters of staged materials that overweight the deck. And we're seeing a rash of now more and more deck collapses due to us overloading the surface.

But imagine a roll that's laying between the trusses on a light gauge steel deck or an OSB deck. The roll itself weighs 500 to 600 pounds. That in and of itself isn't too big of a problem. But when you have five guys walk over to pick it up and they thrust it onto their shoulders, you now have five guys standing in a line. And if they're standing between the trusses, you're now talking about a concentrated load that's nearly 2,000 pounds. And if they're walking between the trusses, they have now exceeded the live load capacity on many of the decks were on these decks.

Mark Graham was most recently out at the North Texas Roofing Contractors Association and gave a horrific depiction of a guy who recently fell through a roof with his harness on tied to his life safety equipment that was laying next to him as he was dead on the ground. 

So imagine this. You're doing all the right things, and you've got your life safety equipment on and you're even tethered off. But when the roof collapses, everything goes with it. And what you're tied off to, if it's a cart of some sort, it's coming with you. 

So we've got to be more careful in the loads that we're putting on these decks. Not only the single rolls, but the concentrated loads where we have people carrying them or maneuvering these rolls around, as we clear a path for these wide width rolls to get rolled out. The way we're staging materials off the side, we've got to be extremely careful. 

And then I think we're seeing a lot more discussions around the load we're actually putting on the deck. Mark Graham, again at the North Texas Roofing Contractors Association, ask a manufacturer for a particular FM number, a number they use every day. And you put the number up on the screen and then need the little icon, a little I that's to the right of the FM listing. If you click on it, it shows you the deck attachment. When I say deck attachment, I mean the substrate attachment to the purlins that you have to have to actually achieve that wind uplift.

So while the manufacturer may have the deck attachment correct of the membrane attached to the deck, we don't have the deck attachment, the deck to the purlin attachment to actually support that wind uplift listing. 

So time and time again, roofing contractors believe that they're meeting a wind uplift requirement based on an FM approval, but they're not actually expanding the FM approval to see if that substrate is attached to the purlins in such a way that it'll actually allow them to achieve that wind uplift listing.

Karen Edwards: Wow. And for those who don't know, Mark Graham is with NRCA, the National Roofing Contractors Association and he is, I believe, their technical person.

Jason Stanley: Yeah, very smart man and very experienced. And he gets a lot of these calls from roofing contractors that he fields on a regular basis, and he sees this as a significant issue as well.

As we move to high-velocity wind zones, wide width rolls really aren't a thing. You can't achieve the wind up with listing or rating that you need in what's called these high-velocity wind zones. Well, historically, that's been the Gulf and Florida and up the East Coast where these hurricane-prone markets are high-velocity wind zones.

Well guess what's coming? There is a new tornado map. I got this one from Mark Graham's presentation. The area in blue is now higher than the areas in light blue, which we've always considered high-velocity wind zones to be the areas in light blue. We now have two-thirds of the country that's going to come into a high-velocity wind zone, and then a super high velocity wind zone in these new tornado zone.

So you now have two-thirds of the country that we're going to struggle to meet wind uplift requirements, even with traditional size rolls of six feet and three feet that we've historically used here.

And then when you go out west, the majority of the west is where we see our wood decks. And with wood decks, we've seen some real challenges. I think it was JM that came out at the IIBEC meeting this last March, did a fascinating job, a wonderful presentation on discussing the load capacities or the variable load capacities on OSB decks. And they were having roofs that were blowing off at 45 miles an hour that necessarily shouldn't be blowing off. But what we saw as an industry when we went over OSB was we were designed to an average load standard. 

So let me give you a good example of that. If you have an OSB deck and you have pull values between 100 and 300, if you designed the average, which is what most of the industry was doing for a period of time, if you designed to a 200 standard, 200 pound withdrawal standard, right? When you get a wind event that comes across that causes the fastener, that only has 100 pounds to extract, what happens when the fastener pulls out? It transfers the load to the next fastener, compounding the load and then you get the zipper effect where the roof just completely gets blown off. 
So as we start talking about OSB decks, JM's primary recommendation for OSB decks was to move back to traditional width rolls were to minimize this and then designed a minimum withdrawal standards, not an average withdrawal standard. 

So we're seeing the West Coast now or the Western United States, which primarily wood decks leaning towards traditional width rolls and minimum withdrawal standards. And then the large part of the two thirds of United States being covered now under these high velocity wind zones where you're going to be moving back to more traditional sized rolls to achieve those wind uplift requirements.

Karen Edwards: So with these higher, high velocity wind zones, we're going to see more roofs specified for the smaller, traditional width rolls.

Jason Stanley: Yeah, you won't be able to achieve it with a wide width roll. Now you can go to induction welding, of course and you can go to fully adhered. But again, this perception is that there's all this labor savings. And I'll tell you to do the time study yourself. Go do a job that's 12 foot wide rolls, and then go do another job that's got six foot wide rolls and you'll find that the labor savings doesn't exist. The ladders and safety lines all go up the same. The loading all is the same. The insulation, the cover board, the details, curbs, the drains, the pipes. The whole thing is all the same with the exception of one component, which is the welding. And at 14 feet a minute, you're going to weld at those extra 700 feet of seams in less than an hour. So we're manhandling these rolls that are heavy. People are getting hurt, dangers of falling through a roof, all to save one man-hour per 200 squares? Just doesn't add up.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, it doesn't. And you mentioned people getting hurt. So let's talk a little bit about job site injuries.

Jason Stanley: Yeah, the NRCA has done incredible work to try and educate people on being safe, right? We talk a lot about safety lines, warning lines, safety training. In fact, every part of becoming pro-certification or pro-certified has an element of safety at the front end of that intentionally, because we want to create a safe workforce. And I applaud the NRCA for their efforts in doing that.

But I don't know how these wide width rolls fit into this. I don't know how as an industry, we think it's okay to require men or women to carry rolls across the roof that weigh 400, 500 or 600 pounds. In situations where it's difficult to get a cart or the cart's too far away, we find people moving these rolls by hand. And what we're seeing is a lot of injuries.
The CNA is trending. I think we're up 300 plus percent in the last decade with soft tissue injuries. And the number one reason is for material handling claims. So I always believe, and I think the industry at large believe hey, we're an aging workforce. We're all getting older, so it makes sense that we're going to see more injuries.

Well, I believe that for a while too, but there's been one significant change in our industry over the last decade and rolls went from weighing 100, 200 pounds to 400, 500 and 600 pounds. And I believe that's what's driving a lot of these soft tissue damages and claims that are the most debilitating, the most expensive to manage.

And when we need everybody on our team to work, and we need people to show up for work, having these soft tissue injuries, lower back or shoulder or other strains, there's no place for in our industry. We need every roofer on the job site. We need them at work, and we need to avoid these injuries at all costs. So I don't know why we're thrusting these wide width rolls, these heavy rolls into situations where there's really no real material labor benefit.

Karen Edwards: And you mentioned OSHA won't define, they won't get into the weight issue.

Jason Stanley: Yeah, I think at some point they're going to have to enter this discussion. But at this point, you're absolutely right. OSHA, it's some sort of how many lifts per day, are you twisting or turning with the lift? It's more of a broad calculation of risk for the activity, if you're going to do it one time versus a repetitive motion. 
And so they haven't come in hard and fast, but I believe a CNA or OSHA saw the size of these rolls or saw five men packing a roll across the roof that weighs five or 600 pounds, their jaw would drop and say, "Yeah, that's not okay."

Karen Edwards: Yeah. And so with those injuries comes a cost. And not only to the business, right, to the person. 

Jason Stanley: Yeah. So we were pleased that the last board meeting of the NRCA board meeting in Chicago back in July to have a speaker come in, a guest speaker from Milwaukee Tools and applaud Milwaukee for serving up Justin Azbill to come in and speak on some really sensitive topics. 

And I'll just kind of prepare everybody in the room, but what I'm going to talk about next may cause you to think differently about our industry and some of the pains that our people face. 

So Justin led off with job site statistics. It's about 1,000 construction workers. This just isn't roofing, but construction workers die per year in job related deaths. Wow, that's a lot. It's 1,000 people in our industry, in the construction industry that aren't coming home at the end of the day due to a job site death. Justin said, "If we look to spend another a billion dollars and do more education, we could probably bring that number down from 1,000 to maybe 900." And we're making strides to make construction safer and safer every day. 

But what we're not talking about is there are 5,000 construction suicides per year, meaning you're five times more likely to die from suicide than you are a job site related accident. I tell you, it absolutely floored me. Justin gave a very long and descriptive account of his struggle with suicide that I think left people in the room feeling very connected to Justin and understanding that, wow, this is something that we don't talk about a lot in the roofing industry, but something that should be talked about more.

And if that statistic wasn't alarming enough that you're five times more likely to die from suicide than you are job site fatality, he went on to talk about alcohol and substance abuse. And you're 15 times more likely to die from substance abuse in the construction industry than you are from a job site death? 15,000 people a year die from overdose of either drugs or alcohol in the construction industry, 15,000.

So again, we spend all this time, energy, effort with our safety people and talking about how to be safe. And if we said we could send some more money, we would all do it in a heartbeat. But I don't think we're really addressing the real problem, that 15,000 people die every year from this drug and alcohol abuse. 

And why is that? Well, Justin will tell you is that the gateway to that is a soft tissue injury at work. People hurt their shoulder, they hurt their back and they got to provide and they got to man up. So what do they do? They pop some pills and they go to work. And then when they continue to hurt their body and abuse their body when moving and manhandling rolls that are three times their size, they take some organs and then they become addicted to other substances and eventually lose the battle with it.

So I think as an industry, if we really want to tackle these issues of safety, we need to start where the biggest problems are. And again, you're five times more likely to die from suicide and 15 times more likely to die from alcohol and substance abuse.

So I think this is a real culture shift for the NRCA to really take this head on. And I hope that we can get some traction around it, that we desperately want our people that are in the roofing industry and in the construction industry at large to be safe. But if safe means coming home at the end of the day, we need to make sure they're fully safe. And that means talking about suicide, and being a little more open to people sharing their feelings and their challenges and their pains and then us doing things to really promote ergonomics and trying and eliminate these soft tissue injuries that are the gateways to drug and alcohol abuse.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's depressing to talk about and to hear those numbers, but the good news is we can make a change. We can make a shift, and let's talk about what we can do.

Jason Stanley: Absolutely. And I applaud that. Some people think I'm on a crusade against some of the other manufacturers that have moved to promote these rolls, and I'm not. I'm not here to downplay their equipment or their processes. You can fix this tomorrow as a contractor by just started ordering half-rolls, right? Instead of a 16-foot wide roll, buy an eight-foot roll. Instead of a 12-foot roll, buy a six-foot roll. Instead of a 10-foot roll, buy a five-foot roll. You won't see a negative impact in your labor or your production. There'll be a perception of change, but you won't realize one. Your fastening patterns will improve. You use fewer fasteners. The weights will go down. And these rolls will be far more manageable the guys on the job site. 

This doesn't mean any big manufacturers need to change what they're doing today relative to their production and how they move their equipment. We just start ordering the smaller rolls, and this can start happening tomorrow. It can happen on your next job.

You can do trials. You can test this. Do a 200 square job and do it in 12-foot rolls, and then do another 200 square job and do it in six-foot rolls. Track your time, how long did it take to load the roof, how long did it take to lay out your insulation, your cover board, do your drains and your walls. And you're going to find that all the details are the same. The only difference will be your welding time, which will be one hour more. And your fastening time, which will be two hours more. Or if you're gluing the deck or using some induction weld, it'll virtually be a push.

And we can get past these heavy rolls and stop promoting this false narrative that 40% fewer seams somehow equates to 40% labor savings and that we have to do these wide-width rolls to be competitive. Simply not true.

Karen Edwards: So we have a bullet point up here that Europe is already doing it. And I didn't ask you this when we talked beforehand, but do you have any insight as to how they started doing that and what got them there? Because a lot of things in Europe eventually make their way over here.

Jason Stanley: Well yeah, Europe's far more pro-labor. We're more pro-business in the US, right? So what do you get when you're more pro-labor? You get rolls that are more ergonomically correct, you get rolls that are better for the laborers.

So their rolls went from 200 pounds to by and large, most of rolls in Europe today are 100 pounds. In fact, that's the new standard that they've looked at from their equivalent of OSHA in Europe is you shouldn't be lifting anything more than 100 pounds, which means it's a 200 pound roll with two people or it's a three-foot roll that weighs 100 that one person can lift. But that's the maximum lift. And in the same time they went from 200 pounds to 100 pounds, we went from 200 pounds to 600 pounds. 

So I like to say this thing of manufacturing centric versus contractor centric. And I think if you look at the European philosophy, much of their stuff is more contractor centric. What's in the best interest of the laborer? In the US, I think there's a lean towards what's manufacturing centric, meaning what can we make faster and cheaper in a plant and the contractor is just going to find ways to deal with it?

And they are. So these examples of, "Well, there's a dolly for that, there's a lift for that, there's a cart for that." Yeah. Those are all attributes of trying to fix a problem that leans towards being manufacturing centric and having the contractor figure out, how are you going to deal with these behemoth monster rolls?

Karen Edwards: Yeah. Wow. So how can I learn more? Anybody out there that's watching that wants more information and wants to help spread the message.

Jason Stanley: Well, I think one thing you could do right is go to my LinkedIn page. It's Jason Stanley. I'm easy to find. It's in IB Roof Systems. I've talked about this not for a week or a month. I've been talking about this for five or six years, standing on a soapbox promoting this.

It seems as if there's an undercurrent now where contractors are realizing that, "Wow, these really aren't that safe. Wow, these really aren't that helpful." We're seeing issues where there's an Amazon project right now that the rolls are fluttering so badly that it's causing noise complaints inside the building. So now they're looking to go back and fasten these in the middle to try and limit the roof flutter.

So you're going to see real-world examples of it. That's where you're going to see it. Performance and how these manage with solar arrays when the roof's fluttering around, roofs that aren't performing like JM and their study that they did on roofs that were blowing off on OSB decks that weren't 45 miles an hour. You're going to see real-world case studies and real-world examples of it. Now, you're probably just going to be more prone to it of, "Oh yeah, that's because we're using this wide width roll. It's a consequence of using it."

You can also talk to our sales reps. Call any IB Roof Systems sales rep in your market. Trust me, I've been talking about this for almost a decade and they all know it because I've told it 100 times over.

I would also suggest that you go to Interface Magazine, a wonderful resource. They typically do a white paper almost every month, and it's in the January issue of 2024. And the Interface Magazine is Colin Murphy's white paper on, I think the title is, Does Roll Size Matter? is the title of the peer reviewed published white paper that is a 42 roofs over two year span of time that carefully details every type of application and points to all these hazards, and then dispels this entire myth around wide width rolls being faster than traditional width goals.

Karen Edwards: It's a marketing thing, it really is. I'm a marketer. I know how you can spin stuff, and I think that's what's happened and it's really caught on and got some legs in the industry.

Jason Stanley: Yeah, two points to that. One of my technical directors was in the room when the statement was made, "How many fewer seams are there? 40% fewer seams? 40% fewer seams, 40% faster." He was there when the phrase was coined, right? This marketing slogan.

Had a guy on my board by the name of Jim Orr, great guy. He is a class action attorney. He actually pays someone to sit in a courtroom. And when they have a valid point that they're trying to get across to the jury, they have someone in the back of the room that marks with a pen every time that statement is made. And when you say it 50 times, becomes true. Whether it's true or not, you say it enough times, this repetitive notion, this notion of 40% fewer seams, 40% faster has been said 1,000 times in our industry and everyone just believes it. Even though it's not true, right? It's just been said. You say it enough times and it becomes believable or ingrained as truth. It's not.

Karen Edwards: Yeah.

Jason Stanley: I think with September coming up is a good time to spend a little focus on this, right? We talked about suicide prevention. I tell you, I was blown away and really set back at that last board meeting and the words from Justin Azbill on suicide and suicide prevention and us talking about it a little bit more. But I was even more put out by the 15,000 people a year or 15 times more likely to die from an overdose or alcoholism. And typically, again, the gateway to that is some sort of injury that happens on a roof. 

So if you've got safety directors in your own companies that focus on rooftop safety, let's get to the root of it, which is let's talk about, be more open to talking about people's feelings and what's going on at home in their life and try and reduce the number of suicides that are out there in the marketplace and help people feel like they can have a safe space to talk about it. And then in addition, let's try and focus on some ergonomics that try and reduce these soft tissue injuries so people don't start taking OxyContin or other drugs to help them get by, to get back to work, to put food on the table for their families that ultimately could end in them losing their life from an overdose.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. And it's not always an easy conversation to start. How do I bring this up? Well, this September, Construction Suicide Prevention Week gives you that reason to say, "Hey, did you know this is what week this is?" And share some of that data and talk about it. And I know we've had some conversations with guests on RoofersCoffeeShop on these topics as well, so you can learn more and you can do more by just, start the conversation.

Jason Stanley: Absolutely.

Karen Edwards: So important, okey-dokey. So Jason, I do want to say before I open up for questions, Jason has been talking about this for a long time. And we've done interviews at trade shows over the years, and the topic is always there. It always comes up. And your passion for improving, and helping workers and their safety is admirable. And this is not just a thought that you're putting out there. This is something you truly believe and you feel passionate about. And I want to thank you for sharing that today with not only myself, but to everyone out there that's watching.

Jason Stanley: Thank you. I do have a heart for this industry and all the hardworking people that work in it. They do a tremendous job in keeping us all safe and dry. It's a very noble field for the work they do. And their jobs are hard enough. Let's try not to punish them with giving them rolls that create these dangerous situations, either from fall through or from some sort of soft tissue damage. So truly, I want to get the word out and I want to educate people so we can keep our guys safe, bring them home each day.

Karen Edwards: We do have a couple of questions, and feel free to use the Q&A feature or drop in the chat. One question was, "Think about the maneuverability difficulty of a large roll by comparison, particularly in congested roof areas with the skylights and stuff." Yeah. And we talked about that. That was a good comment. Thank you Bruce for that. And then another question actually, that was more a comment agreeing, but, "Do we know when the new tornado wind zones go into effect?"

Jason Stanley: Mark Graham's got a presentation. He has his own website. I don't know the exact, it's some sort of, if you Google Mark Graham NRCA, you'll see his own personal website. He tracks all his presentations on that website. Really easy to get to. You may even be able to go to his bio or his LinkedIn page. I'm sure he's got a link to his lectures. But he gave this lecture and said this was approved by the, I believe ICC. And so this will be rolling out in the new ICC.
As you know, ICC can take a while to adopt things. You can have certain cities, counties, states that are operating on two versions ago of the ICC. And so this will take a while for this to percolate through, but to my understanding, it's in the new ICC. And then this will be rolled out an adopted city, county, state across the country, as they move to the new version of ICC. 

Karen Edwards: And ICC is International Code Council, right?

Jason Stanley: Correct, yes.

Karen Edwards: All right. Yeah, and that gets refreshed every so many years. So yeah, it's coming. If it's not in your area yet, it will be soon. Alrighty. I do not see any additional questions. So again, I know I said this already, but I just want to say thank you. Thank you IB Roof Systems. Thank you Jason for this message and getting it out into the industry. And ultimately, because you do want to help everyone be healthy and safe. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about. So Jason, thank you for being here.

Jason Stanley: Thank you for having me. Love to share the message, and thank you for all you do. RoofersCoffeeShop has been a tremendous resource in growing the grassroots movements. And some of these things you don't always hear about magazines or in trade shows, but you guys always seem to be truth seekers and I applaud you guys for that. And thank you for giving me a platform to share this message about our industry.

Outro: Yeah, thank you, Jason. That's something that we strive to do. And we have a whole section on our website filled with Read Listen Watch. We invite you to check back in about a day or two and you'll be able to see this presentation up there. So we encourage you to share it. And then you can check out the other webinars that we have out there too. And hopefully we can help you and help your business. Thanks for being here today, everyone. Bye-bye.