North American Building Products Foams and Insulation: Supply Base and Application Map

Foam insulation is the one building product category where the material supplier and the brand are usually the same company. Owens Corning extrudes Foamular XPS and sells it under its own name. Johns Manville laminates polyiso and sells it with its own roofing membrane. Kingspan, Carlisle (Hunter Panels and Insulfoam), Atlas, GAF, Sika (Rmax), and DuPont (Styrofoam and Thermax) do the same. There is no Tier 1 molder between the resin and the brand the way there is in siding or decking. The board makers buy MDI, polyol, polystyrene, blowing agent, and facer, and everything after that happens inside their plants.

That structure sets the size of the opening. Rigid board is a capital-intensive, closed market with about ten makers who own their laminators and extruders and are not looking for a new board supplier. What they buy from outside is chemistry, and the chemistry roster changed in the last few years. Every XPS line and every closed-cell spray foam system in North America reformulated from HFC blowing agents to hydrofluoroolefins between 2017 and 2021 under the EPA SNAP rules and then the AIM Act. Honeywell (Solstice) and Chemours (Opteon) supplied the replacement molecules, the surfactant and catalyst suppliers rewrote their packages to match, and the resulting positions are locked in by the ICC-ES reports and fire tests that had to be rerun on the new formulations.

Spray polyurethane foam is the more open half of the insulation market. A dozen systems houses blend A-side MDI and B-side polyol into drums and sell them to a few thousand spray contractors. Huntsman Building Solutions consolidated Demilec, Icynene, and Lapolla into the largest one, Carlisle bought Accella, and Johns Manville, BASF, Gaco (Holcim Elevate), SES, and NCFI round out the roster. The buy is chemistry, drums are formulated to a recipe that a code report certifies, and a new polyol, surfactant, catalyst, or flame retardant can get a trial there in a way it cannot at a board plant.

Acoustic products are a separate and smaller market that shares a few materials with insulation and none of the customers. Armstrong World Industries, USG, and CertainTeed Ceilings make mineral fiber and fiberglass ceiling panels on very large lines. Below them, a fragmented set of fabricators (Kinetics Noise Control, Acoustical Surfaces, pinta acoustic, and dozens of regional shops) converts PET felt, fiberglass board, melamine foam, and polyurethane foam into wall panels, baffles, and floor underlayment for commercial interiors. That is where a converter with a new felt, a new foam, or a new finish can find a buyer.

Demand follows commercial roofing for polyiso, the energy code and housing starts for spray foam and sheathing, and the office and institutional construction cycle for acoustics. The regulator writes the volume forecast: every cycle of the International Energy Conservation Code has added continuous insulation, R-value, and air sealing, and foam is how most assemblies meet it.

The OEM in this industry is the building product brand, the same roster the polymers report carries: the roofing majors, the window and door assemblers, the siding, decking, and pipe brands. On this lens most of those brands are customers of insulation rather than makers of it. The exception, and the reason the tier map looks different here, is that the insulation makers are also brands. Owens Corning, Johns Manville, Carlisle, Kingspan, Atlas, GAF, Sika, and DuPont hold an OEM row in the shared roster and a Tier 1 row on this lens for the board they make.

Tier 1 is the vertically integrated board and ceiling maker. Polyiso is laminated continuously between facers on lines owned by JM, Carlisle (Hunter), Atlas, GAF, Rmax (Sika), Holcim Elevate, and Kingspan. XPS is extruded by Owens Corning, DuPont, and Kingspan. EPS is molded in blocks by Carlisle (Insulfoam), Atlas Molded Products, Plasti-Fab, and a long tail of regional block molders that buy bead from Epsilyte and BASF. Insulated concrete forms are molded by or for the ICF brands, of which Nudura (Tremco CPG) is the largest. On the acoustic side, Armstrong, USG, and CertainTeed felt mineral fiber and bond fiberglass into ceiling panels on their own lines.

Tier 2 is the systems house and the fabricator. Spray foam systems houses (Huntsman Building Solutions, Carlisle Spray Foam Insulation, JM, BASF, Gaco, SES, NCFI, Foam Supplies) formulate and blend but do not install; their customer is the spray contractor and their gatekeeper is the ICC-ES evaluation report. One-component can foam makers (DuPont Great Stuff, DAP Touch n Foam, Henkel, Soudal) fill aerosol cans for window and door installation. Acoustic fabricators cut, wrap, and finish panels to order. Accessory foam extruders (Nomaco, Sekisui Voltek, Armacell, and the PE foam extruders) make sill seal, backer rod, underlayment, and pipe and duct insulation.

Tier 3 is the chemistry, and it is the same short list that sits under every polyurethane market: MDI and polyol from Dow, BASF, Covestro, Huntsman, and Wanhua; HFO blowing agents from Honeywell and Chemours; silicone surfactants and amine catalysts from Evonik and Momentive; polymeric flame retardants from ICL, LANXESS, and Albemarle; EPS bead from Epsilyte and BASF; styrene and polystyrene from AmSty and INEOS Styrolution for the XPS extruders. The supplier that matters most on this lens and least on any other is the blowing agent producer, because the blowing agent is what the whole industry just reformulated around.

Distribution is a contractor channel, not a resin channel. ABC Supply and Beacon carry roof and wall board to roofing contractors alongside the membrane. Service Partners (TopBuild) and IDI Distributors carry spray foam systems, rigs, and parts to insulation contractors, and TopBuild also owns the largest installers outright, which makes it both the channel and the customer for the systems houses. Acoustic products move through specialty acoustic distribution and direct to the architect-driven project.

The OEM roster is shared with the polymers report and is not repeated in full. What this report adds is which brands make foam, which buy it, and which only specify it.

The makers are the insulation and roofing brands. Owens Corning (enterprise, Toledo) runs the largest XPS footprint in North America and reformulated Foamular to Foamular NGX on HFO in 2021. DuPont (enterprise) holds Styrofoam Brand XPS and Thermax polyiso, bought from Dow in 2019, and Great Stuff can foam. Johns Manville (enterprise, Berkshire Hathaway) is the largest polyiso maker by line count and the one that also makes its own glass facers, plus a spray foam line and fiberglass duct liner. Carlisle Construction Materials (large) holds Hunter Panels polyiso, Insulfoam EPS, and Carlisle Spray Foam Insulation, which makes it the only company with a position in every foam format on this lens. GAF (enterprise), Holcim Elevate (large), and Sika (large, through Rmax) make polyiso mainly to sell under their own roofs. Atlas Roofing (mid) makes polyiso and EPS. Kingspan Insulation North America (mid) makes XPS, polyiso, and the only phenolic board in the market.

The buyers are the assemblers. The window and door brands buy one-component foam for installation kits and specify low-expansion grades so the frame does not bow. The fiberglass door brands (Therma-Tru, Masonite under Owens Corning, JELD-WEN, Plastpro) pour polyurethane into door slabs, which the polymers report covers as a door core. The SIP fabricators and the insulated metal panel makers buy EPS block and pour polyurethane. The siding brands buy EPS backer for insulated siding.

The specifiers are the roofing membrane brands on assemblies they do not make. A TPO roof from any brand goes over polyiso, usually that brand's own board, and the warranty is written for the assembly. That is why polyiso is sold with the membrane rather than against it and why a board maker without a membrane sells through distribution instead.

Acoustics has its own OEMs. Armstrong World Industries (large, Lancaster PA) and USG (large, Chicago, Knauf-owned) split most of the mineral fiber ceiling market with CertainTeed Ceilings (Saint-Gobain). Their buy is slag wool, perlite, starch, and glass fiber for the panels they make, plus PET felt and wood fiber for the specialty lines that are growing faster than the tile.

The full roster, with which of these companies runs which foam format and where, is in the gated portion of this report.