Gypsum industry news

US: The Gypsum Association has appointed Christian Chinsio as its new Director of Codes, Standards and Research. Chinsio has 28 years’ experience in management and technical roles in the building materials industry. He is Technical Development Manager at CertainTeed Gypsum, with responsibility over product rationalisation, competitive testing and quality improvements across plants nationwide. He previously represented CertainTeed Gypsum on the Gypsum Association's Building Code and Technical Committee. Other prior management roles include positions at Continental Building Products and Lafarge North America.

Gypsum Association Executive Director Steve Meima said "Christian's 28 years of building products manufacturing experience, the past 25 being specific to gypsum panel and gypsum products manufacturing, is sure to serve well the interests of our members and the technical information needs of architectural, engineering and construction professionals."

US: Workers have walked out of Saint-Gobain CertainTeed’s Blue Diamond gypsum plant in Nevada after rejecting the company's final contract offer. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has reported that 70 of the plant’s employees will participate in the action in protest against the contract offer, which fell ‘way short of acceptable.’

North America: Saint-Gobain North America has won a Silver Stevie Award in the Large Manufacturing Company of the Year category for its circularity initiatives, rapid growth and commitment to US industrial development. 3BL News has reported that the company will claim the prize at the 23rd annual American Business Awards ceremony in New York City later in 2025.

The recognition comes as Saint-Gobain celebrates its 360-year anniversary. It has invested a combined US$400m in plant expansions and upgrades scheduled to come online in 2025, including building North America’s first carbon-neutral gypsum wallboard plant at its Montreal facility in Quebec, Canada.

Canada: CertainTeed Canada will begin to sell its new CarbonLow range of reduced-CO₂ gypsum wallboard in 2025. The range includes Easi-Lite, Type X and M2Tech boards and GlasRoc sheathing. The products offer 60% lower emissions cradle-to-gate than the company’s ‘traditional’ gypsum wallboard.

Canada: CertainTeed Canada has received environmental assessment approval from the Nova Scotia Department of Environment and Climate Change for its Antrim Gypsum Project in Halifax County, Nova Scotia. It can now move to the project’s permitting phase and toward construction beginning in 2026.

The subsidiary of France-based Saint-Gobain intends to establish operations in Nova Scotia, where eastern North America’s only known major source of gypsum is located. The company will then strengthen its ability to supply its wallboard plants in eastern Canada and the US with locally mined gypsum.

CertainTeed Canada also recently completed construction on its Kootenay West Mine in British Columbia, which is now operational at full capacity with plans to develop a new railway to connect better to other units in western Canada. The company is also reopening its Amaranth Mine in Manitoba to serve central Canada. These efforts are in addition to a partnership with New West Gypsum to recycle and reuse wallboard in production in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec, which has led to over 1Mt of wallboard being recycled and reused at the Vancouver plant alone.

Canada: Saint-Gobain subsidiary CertainTeed Canada has announced the upcoming launch of BasCarbone, a new range of 60% reduced-CO₂ gypsum wallboard. The company will produce BasCarbone wallboard at its carbon-neutral Montreal plant in Quebec.

Canada: CertainTeed Canada has begun upgrading its Montréal gypsum wallboard plant to convert the plant to net zero Scope 1 and 2 CO₂ emissions. The producer says that the plant will become the first net-zero facility of its kind in North America.

Georgia-Pacific officially opened its new gypsum wallboard plant at Sweetwater in Texas earlier this month. The US$325m project is situated next to the company’s existing plant at the site, Sweetwater West, on the other side of a road. Canada-based Gyptech said in 2021 that it was supplying the equipment for the new high-speed line at the site.

When Georgia-Pacific first announced the new project in 2020, it mentioned that it would be able to keep its logistics costs low, use raw gypsum reserves and the existing workforce. Despite this, the plant has still created over 100 new jobs. The company also said that it anticipated closing its 60Mm²/yr Quanah plant, also in Texas, depending upon market conditions. This came to pass in March 2023. Altogether, both plants at Sweetwater will have a production capacity of around 93Mm²/yr. This implies that the new plant has a production capacity of around 60Mm²/yr, given that the existing plant’s capacity is 30Mm²/yr. Funnily enough this is the same as the Quanah plant.

The new plant at Sweetwater may be a sign that the US wallboard market is picking up again. Georgia-Pacific has invested some serious money and it is targeting Texas, a leading area for construction nationally. However, it does come with a few caveats. Firstly, the new plant at Sweetwater is replacing existing capacity at Quanah. Secondly, it is using some of the advantages of the existing plant such as its trucks and its proximity to its customers. This suggests that the company may be wary of building a new plant in a greenfield location with all the potential risks that might involve.

US wallboard sales have regularly peaked and troughed over the decades, like many other commodity markets, as demand and production capacity race each other. Sales of wallboard peaked around the year 2000 and then again in the mid 2000s before tailing off following the 2007 recession. They have been recovering ever since and started to get close to the levels seen in the first half of the 2000s in 2022 when the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported wallboard sales of 2.6Bnm².

Generally, the last tranche of new wallboard plants in the US were built or approved in the late 2000s before the financial downturn. These new sites included CertainTeed’s Roxboro plant in North Carolina and the Moundsville plant in West Virginia, Gold Bond Building Products’ Mount Holly plant in North Carolina and American Gypsum’s Georgetown plant in South Carolina. From this point though various plants were either closed or mothballed. Some of the latter have been restarted as the market slowly recovered. New plant projects in the 2010s tended to be upgrades or replacements. One example of this was USG’s plan to rebuild a production line at its Jacksonville plant in Florida, which was announced in late 2017 before Knauf took over the company in 2018. Another was National Gypsum’s scheme to reopen its Wilmington plant in North Carolina in 2019. At the same time in the 2010s there were a number of mergers and acquisitions including Lafarge’s sale of its gypsum business in North America in 2013, Knauf’s takeover of USG in 2019 and Saint-Gobain’s acquisition of Continental Building Products in 2020.

When Georgia-Pacific started building the new plant at Sweetwater in 2020 this marked the start of a new phase of US wallboard plant projects. American Gypsum announced plans for an upgrade to its Albuquerque gypsum wallboard plant in 2021, Gold Bond Building Products started building its long-delayed Eloy plant in Arizona in 2022 and it said it was spending US$90m on an upgrade to its Mount Holly gypsum wallboard plant in North Carolina in 2023, and CertainTeed revealed it wanted to build a second production line at its Palatka gypsum wallboard plant in Florida also in 2023.

Congratulations are due to Georgia-Pacific for the achievement at Sweetwater. Optimism for the US market in general may also be in order given the slow but steady stream of projects that have been announced and completed since 2020. The next step, when a company builds a new wallboard plant at a greenfield site in the US, looks set to happen when Gold Bond Building Products completes its Eloy plant.

US: Saint-Gobain has acquired the remaining equity interest and assets of Seven Hills Paperboard, including a gypsum paper board liner manufacturing plant in Lynchburg, Virginia, from its joint venture partner WestRock. The purchase adds to the gypsum wallboard operations of Saint-Gobain’s CertainTeed Interior Products Group. The company said that the internal integration of gypsum paper board liner production represented a “significant” step in strengthening the supply chain for this material.

Mark Rayfield, President and Chief Executive Officer of Saint-Gobain North America and CertainTeed Canada said “The acquisition of these assets represents our continued commitment to our customers to provide quality gypsum wallboard products.” He added, “I would like to welcome our 80 new team members in Lynchburg and look forward to your contributions to our purpose, ‘To Make the World a Better Home.”

Canada/US: Saint-Gobain has signed a 15-year renewable electricity supply agreement (PPA) with TotalEnergies for the purchase of solar power for its 125 industrial sites in the US and Canada. This 100MW PPA, known as the Danish Fields Solar Project (Danish Fields), is expected to offset Saint-Gobain’s North American CO₂ emissions from electricity (scope 2 emissions) by 90,000t/yr. The project is expected to come online by the end of 2024.

Danish Fields is the third PPA signed in North America by Saint-Gobain. The first PPA, with the Blooming Grove Wind Farm in Illinois, was signed in 2020, and the second, with TotalEnergies’ Cottonwood Bayou Solar Project in Texas, was signed in 2022. All three projects have been supported by Edison Energy, a leading energy and sustainability advisory that consults with the largest commercial, industrial and institutional energy users.

Mark Rayfield, the chief executive officer of Saint-Gobain North America, said “With this agreement, Saint-Gobain North America will further reduce its CO₂ emissions, demonstrating how fast the manufacturing industry can transform when long term solutions are at hand. This renewable energy project is a new milestone on the way to meeting Saint-Gobain’s commitment to reduce scope 1 and 2 CO₂ emissions by 33% by 2030 - compared to 2017 - and to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.”

The three projects combined are expected to represent a reduction of more than 70% in Saint-Gobain North America’s scope 2 emissions, compared to 2017 levels.