US: Georgia-Pacific’s Sweetwater West gypsum wallboard plant in Texas has completed an upgrade to its board-drying equipment. It has installed an Energy Optimization System (EOS), also known as a waste heat recovery unit, including new ducting, two new fans and a new exhaust stack, to an existing four-zone dryer. The newly upgraded system enables the collection of the waste exhaust from three zones of the plant and injects it into a fourth zone. This enables the burner in that zone to operate at a lower capacity. Around 2500t/yr of CO₂ is saved in the process.

David Neal, vice president of Gypsum Operations for Georgia-Pacific said, “Advancements in energy savings and resource consumption reduction are goals toward which Georgia-Pacific works every single day.”

Georgia-Pacific started building a second wallboard plant next to its Sweetwater West plant in late 2020. The new 65Mm²/yr unit was scheduled to start production in late 2022.

India: Saint-Gobain India is planning to invest around US$215m towards capacity expansion plans in 2023. The building materials producer said in an interview with the Financial Express newspaper that it is part of a wider scheme to spend up to US$970m between 2022 and 2025. It aims to increase its annual revenue to US$3.7bn by 2030. The expenditure is separate from any plans for mergers and acquisitions. The company is expanding all its businesses in the country, including gypsum wallboard, glass, construction chemicals and ceramics.

New Zealand: Fletcher Building says it will stop using retroactive quantity-based rebates after it learned that the Commerce Commission had started an investigation into the practice in November 2022. The owner of Winstone Wallboards defended the use of such rebates and said they were common in the sector. However, it added that it was showing ‘leadership’ and had considered the commission’s preference that it not use quantity rewarding rebates. It will instead switch to a flat pricing model based on volume.

The Commerce Commission published its final report look at general residential building supplies following the release of a draft in August 2022. It set up nine recommendations to improve competition and supply of such products generally. Two main factors it identified as making it difficult for competing products to be introduced and expand in the market were the building regulatory system and quantity-forcing rebates paid by established suppliers to merchants. It noted that, under certain conditions, these types of rebate could reinforce the way the existing regulatory system was making it harder for new or competing products to access the market.

Saudi Arabia: USG Boral Middle East has rebranded as USG Middle East (USG ME) with the tagline ‘Innovative Solutions Everytime.’ The company is a joint venture between Knauf-subsidiary USG and Juman Industrial Investment Company. It was originally founded in 1985 and later become part of USG Boral. It produces gypsum wallboard, ceiling, interior finishing, substrate and metal framing products.