A new factory can turn almost any plastic into a useful product
economist.com
economist.com
My big question tho is how much energy does this process use? Is it energy efficient enough to offset the wood/glue/manufacturing of plywood stuff?
Water is insidious. Things move and degrade with age, with the seasons, and with the weather.
Two things keep a roof tight:
1) using gravity to help you 2) using multiple lines of defense
On the gravity point, what I mean is that water rolls down hill. The great thing about conventional shingles is that they overlap by 50% of their length. For water to infiltrate it needs to get under a shingle and then wick up. Water doesn't tend to do this.
On the multiple lines of defense point, a good roof has two layers of shingle at any given point (row n and row n+1), as well as tar paper (or better yet, a polymer sheeting like "Ice & Water Shield".
Edit: it also seems that metal roofing does not follow the same set of constraings that shingle roofs do, which suggests to me that this plastic roofing could be very viable.
Plywood can't be recycled because it has nails and paint, but plastic can?
The reason that folks don't recycle plywood is that it's part of construction debris. When you gut a place, you end up with dumpsters full of random crap: sheetrock, plywood, studs, pipes, etc. The labor to pick this apart isn't available at a reasonable price.
I don't see that replacing plywood with plastic changes the economics here.
...which is not to say that plastic sheeting is a bad idea.
Right now I'm guessing they're using plastic already separated out by residents as part of a community recycling program. What I want to know is how they deal with dirty plastic? No one will want these plastic sheets if they smell like sour milk.