Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Clayton Rockwell uses Innovation to Make a Positive Environmental Impact

At Clayton, it is our responsibility to drive change and find innovative building solutions that reduce our impact on the environment. All 40 Clayton home building facilities have a waste diversion program that measures the pounds of waste diverted from landfills each year. When building our homes in off-site facilities, Clayton team members consistently look for ways to efficiently use materials to divert as much waste as possible from landfills. Clayton reduces the environmental impact of our homes by constructing them in climate-controlled environments and buying raw material in bulk quantities.

In March 2022, Clayton Rockwell, a home building facility in North Carolina, was tasked with building a home, the Cypress, for the Manufactured Housing Institute’s Congress & Expo. The team at Clayton Rockwell took this request as a challenge to find even more ways to reduce the amount of non-recyclable waste that would travel with the home to the display site.

“Everybody at Clayton Rockwell was bought in. We got together with department managers and told them our goal,” explained Brand Experience Manager Vance McMillian. “We had a team member lead and champion this process. He traveled with the home down the [construction] line and found ways to use materials that could have made it [to landfills].”

One improvement facility team members discovered was the ability to use leftover gypsum wall board for insulation damming. Insulation damming is used to keep the insulation in place during the home’s transit and ensure the insulation stays over the conditioned living space and out of the overhang to allow air to flow properly.

”Insulation damming would normally be built out of plastic, so we saved the environment a little bit by not using plastic, and a little bit by reusing material that would have gone to waste,” Vance McMillan explained.

As a result, Clayton Rockwell is refining the insulation damming process for all of its future homes and looks forward to sharing that process with other building facilities in the future.