New Zealand: Winstone Wallboards says it will increase the supply of gypsum wallboard available for distribution by merchants by 1Mm² from July to September 2022. It said this will equate to a 7 – 8% increase of various types of plasterboard.

Fletcher Building chief executive Ross Taylor said “The increases we will be bringing to market are possible because we will soon commission changes to the configuration of our manufacturing that we have been working on over the past three months which will produce extra, locally produced, volumes. We have also been able to secure and will import additional board from an Australian manufacturer that we can feed into our supply chain.” He added that the allocation model the company has introduced had started to help supply levels and that the completion of the new plant at Tauranga in June 2023 would also help.

In early June 2022 social housing developer Simplicity Living said it had cancelled all of its orders of Fletcher Building Gib board. In an interview with Stuff, Shane Brealey - the managing director of Simplicity Living, said that the company had decided to import wallboard instead. It said it could source equivalent wallboard products at a 20% discount or more. It added that it was taking it eight weeks to import wallboard from South-East Asia compared to eight months from Auckland.

Winstone Wallboards responded to the criticism by saying it previously had been importing wallboard from Etex Australia for around six months until the end of 2021. The arrangement ended as Australia also has a wallboard shortage. However, it added that the import arrangement might restart from August 2022 onwards.

Canada: Saint-Gobain plans to carry out a US$70.9m upgrade and 40% capacity expansion of its 30Mm²/yr Montreal gypsum wallboard plant in Quebec. The project includes the replacement of natural gas with renewable electricity and a 30% reduction in energy consumption through efficiency improvements. As a result, it will turn the facility into North America’s first zero-carbon gypsum wallboard plant. Work will commence in mid-2023, with the commissioning of the upgraded plant following in late 2024.

Saint-Gobain’s vice president environmental, social, governance (ESG) North America and managing director, circular economy solutions Dennis Wilson said "Today we begin a historic new chapter at our Montreal gypsum plant, leading our industry towards a more sustainable future while increasing our production capacity at a time of unprecedented customer demand," said. "We thank our partners in the Quebec Government, the City of Saint-Catherine and Hydro-Québec for their support, and we thank our team for pushing the limits of technology and imagination to bring this bold project to life. The electrification of our Montreal plant is a massive step forward in our broader goal to decarbonise construction materials and a significant step towards our global goal of carbon neutrality by 2050."

Romania: Belgium-based Etex invested Euro1m on upgrades to the logistics capacities of its Turceni gypsum wallboard plant and its Aghiresu plaster plant. It also started work on a Euro6m sludge drying unit at coal-fired power plant in Oltenia that will supply synthetic gypsum for use at Turceni, according to See News. The company operates locally under the Siniat Romania brand. It reported a 20% year-on-year rise in turnover to Euro59.6m in 2021.

US: CertainTeed has completed a US$1.3m upgrade to its Nashville wallboard plant in Arkansas to use recycled waste gypsum and paper. The plant will reuse 65,000t/yr of waste materials generated from the production process. The company plans to increase the amount of recycled materials in its gypsum wallboard in the future.

“In Nashville and at our manufacturing sites around the world, we remain laser-focused on reducing waste, reducing our consumption of natural resources, and increasing recycling and circularity throughout our value chain,” said Jay Bachmann, Vice President and General Manager of CertainTeed Gypsum.