Shoppers visiting The Elements retail centre in Livingston, Scotland, are unlikely to know that 14,000m2 of STYROFOAM™ boards will be helping to keep them warm over winter.

Insulation products specialist Dow Building Solutions supplied thousands of ROOFMATE™ SL-A extruded polystyrene boards made of STYROFOAM™ to the project via roofing contractor BriggsAmasco, which was responsible for the £4m roof installation contract for the Land Securities' development.

ROOFMATE™ SL-A was used in the flat roofing areas of the 375,000sq ft shopping centre development to improve thermal efficiency and help the project achieve BREEAM accreditation.

As an added bonus, the boards were manufactured using recycled CO2 as a blowing agent in order to create the extruded polystyrene foam. Product made with such manufacturing methods is still new to the UK, and Dow Building Solutions had to pull out all the stops to ensure enough of the material was delivered to the site in what was a very tight timescale.


"Heat loss from flat roofs can be as much as 25% of the total, so any improvements in preventing heat loss from such structures have significant benefits for energy saving," explained Tony Lawther, manager of BriggsAmasco's Glasgow branch which managed the installation.

"This helps to improve cost control and is also better for the environment - the excellent delivery service we had from Dow helped keep construction time lean too."

BriggsAmasco was sub-contractor for Miller Construction which operated for Land Securities on the £130m scheme. Now complete, the 375,000sq ft centre has two 90,000sq ft anchor stores, Marks & Spencer and Debenhams, as well as an internal winter garden and four shopping avenues with 30 shop units and five restaurants.

ROOFMATE™ SL-A is an ideal solution for insulating flat, inverted roofs as the insulation boards are unaffected by the conditions encountered on flat roofs such as wide fluctuations in temperature and repeated freeze/thaw cycles.

The insulation is intended for use on heavyweight decks such as reinforced concrete with a ballast layer of gravel or concrete slabs. It can also be used in the ROOFMATE™ MinK system, which reduces the rain water cooling penalty, thereby minimising the insulation thickness required.

(GK/JM)