The vinyl siding industry has seen years of significant growth in the residential building market. Vinyl siding with its relative ease of installation, low maintenance, and durability, has been the cladding material preferred by countless homeowners, contractors and builders with about 40 million squares sold annually. As vinyl siding began to expand to all regions of the country and more and more color choices were made available, some colors showed undesirable fade on exposure. Despite vinyl's excellent reputation for colorhold in light colors, certain popular colors, such as blue and dark beige, did not hold up so well in certain environments, particularly in high sunshine areas of the south. As a first step to improve colorhold, vinyl siding which was already typically co-extruded with a fairly UV tolerant vinyl capstock (primarily accomplished with high TiO2 levels), as much as 50% of the vinyl in the cap was replaced with a more weatherable non-vinyl polymer such as ASA, Eventually, as vinyl siding acceptance expanded throughout the U.S. and Canada, even blends of PVC with more weatherable polymers were found inadequate for the level of colorhold that consumers demanded.
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