Need New Signs? Don’t Replace—REFACE!

Glenco’s Sign Reface Program offers a greener, more economical way to maintain signage for optimal visibility and safety. Instead of purchasing new signs, municipalities can reface their old signs to look like brand new. This approach stretches budgets while reducing waste and minimizing aluminum scrap in landfills.

Because reflective sign sheeting has a limited lifespan, it is essential to replace signs every 10-12 years. We help municipalities start the process by collecting their old signs from streets and storage facilities and we clean the old, degraded surfaces. We replace the old surfaces with 3M Hi-Intensity or Diamond Grade (HIP/DG3) reflective sign faces, which improves visibility and the signs look brand new.

We manage the process with a schedule that maintains optimal traffic safety while lowering costs.  The plan is based on plow routes or sanitation routes, so there is an established pattern created by the municipality to manage the project.  Glenco supplies a small number of new signs to replace the batch that is removed from a given route for the refacing program. This ensures uninterrupted traffic flow and safety, and avoids purchasing an entire new fleet of signs. When each group of signs is refaced and reinstalled, the new signs are rolled out to the next route and rotated accordingly. Customers typically start with stop signs, the most important and visible sign on the road, and the sequence continues until the entire town’s signage is refaced.

Glenco President Glen Abrams explains the value of the sign refacing:  “We are one of the only suppliers that offers this innovative and cost-effective program. It’s a unique value proposition, because we really do save our customers money, while offering a greener approach to traffic and street sign safety. Instead of dumping piles of metal into landfills, we clean up the signs, resurface them with top-quality materials, and return them to the streets like new.”

In actual dollars and cents, sign refacing delivers significant cost savings. In the past, old signs would be sold to a salvage yard for pennies on the dollar or end up in a landfill, which likely means a cost for disposal—neither of which is good news for a municipal budget or the environment. A Glenco refaced stop sign, whose appearance is virtually indistinguishable from the new one, is a savings of about $3.25 per square foot from a new sign.  When multiplied by the hundreds or thousands of signs required in a city or town, refacing saves a lot of taxpayer dollars and enables municipalities to allocate funds to other necessary projects and services.

Click here to learn more about Glenco’s refacing program, and our other products and services.