Employee Q&A: Sustainability, Asphalt, and Meeting Our 2030 Goals
Ozma Lane, Senior Scientist II
Our people making a difference is a series featured throughout Owens Corning’s 2023 Sustainability Report.
With a background in polymer chemistry, Ozma Lane could have pursued a career in academia. Luckily for us, though, she brought her talents to Owens Corning nearly six years ago, first developing improvements to our shingle materials and more recently as part of our Asphalt team. Working at our Science & Technology Center in Granville, Ozma is focused on ensuring that we are making sustainability gains while still meeting the high product standards that have made Owens Corning a market leader.
On the importance of sustainability in asphalt
Within the Asphalt team, at least a portion of every scientist’s work is focused on sustainability. The initial reason I was brought into this role was to evaluate ways for us to meet our 2030 sustainability goals, finding more sustainable materials to lower our embodied carbon footprint. Asphalt has an impact on the embodied carbon of our shingle product. Any change we can make to reduce the carbon content of our asphalt can help us meet our 2030 goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is a project for the long term — this is not a sprint — but we’re seeing a lot of opportunities on different timescales.
On the importance of collaboration at Owens Corning
The connections we have with our colleagues on different products and in different groups means that I can find something useful, even if it’s not what I was originally looking for as an application. That lets us find opportunities for innovation more quickly because we’re applying each new idea or material to a broader field of products.
That is something that you see in a company that has a very cooperative culture. People want to help each other and that’s a real strength that lets us evolve and communicate a lot more quickly. The willingness to cooperate and be supportive of each other lets us make more use of each other’s strengths when people of working with that goal in mind.
On choosing Owens Corning as a career
If you had told me in grad school that I would really dig a job where sometimes I was in head-to-toe PPE and steel-toed boots and working in a shingle factory for 10 or 12 hours at a time — and that I would like it— I would assume you were joking. But I would expect to spend my career in building materials because it’s a very real business. I want to reduce emissions and impact climate change through the work I do. That’s a pretty awesome responsibility, and it means I can make an impact in a way that I couldn’t if I was in a different career.
