Building Resilience – Part 4: Resilience Matters In Manufacturing

A window and door maker is talking about resilience in a different sense than storm-proofing alone. In an interview, Andersen Windows & Doors' chief sustainability officer George Bandy Jr. describes resilience as something that shows up in daily comfort, not just during hurricanes or wildfires: daylight, security, and how a home feels day to day. He argues that windows and doors only perform well as part of a whole house system, working together with insulation, wall assemblies, and airtight construction. Gaps or mismatched materials between products, he says, are often where problems like air leaks start.

Bandy also talks about how the company is trying to close the loop on materials. Wood flour left over from manufacturing gets turned into Fibrex, a composite material used in some windows. More recently, Andersen has started recycling glass from old windows pulled out during replacement jobs, rather than sending it to a landfill. That recycled glass gets used elsewhere, including in reflective road markings and countertops. None of this changes what's on the shelf today, but it points to where window technology and materials may be headed: products built for very long service life, with more thought given to what happens to them at the end of that life.

For a homeowner, the takeaway is less about a specific product and more about perspective: when shopping for new windows or doors, how they integrate with the rest of your home's envelope matters as much as the product specs themselves, and asking what a manufacturer does with old materials is becoming a reasonable question to ask.