Displaying items by tag: recycling
Isover France launches Isover Recycling
26 April 2018France: Isover France has launched Isover Recycling, a closed-loop recycling service for construction and demolition glass wool waste. The new service has been developed in partnership with recycling specialists. It aims to reduce glass wool dumping in landfill and increase the proportion of recycled content in Isover’s glass wool insulation products. The Isover Recycling service is currently being deployed in two pilot areas: South-East France and Ile-de-France. It will then be rolled-out across the rest of the country. Other countries like Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden already offer construction site waste recycling services.
UK: Knauf Insulation and Veolia have officially opened a Euro11m glass-recycling unit at Knauf’s St Helens mineral wool plant. The unit will be able to recycle over 60,000t/yr of used glass that will then be used as a glass cullet source for glass mineral wool production.
"We have been using recycled glass in our manufacturing process for some time already. As well as securing our glass supply, the quality and consistency that we are getting now from the new facility will enable us to increase further the percentage of glass cullet we use in the manufacture of our glass mineral wool insulation solutions, taking us one step further in our sustainability journey,” said John Sinfield, Managing Director at Knauf Insulation Northern Europe.
Veolia's unit sorts and separates glass to produce pure glass cullet. Machinery at the unit includes vibrating screens for size sorting, magnets to extract ferrous materials and eddy current separators for non-ferrous materials. The new facility enables Knauf Insulation to secure its glass supply and maximise the use of recycled materials instead of using virgin minerals. The closeness of the new unit to the St Helens plant is also expected to save around 600,000km of road journeys. Glass mineral wool products from the plant contain up to 80% recycled materials, the vast majority of which now comes from the glass cullet supplied by Veolia. The new recycling unit has also created 18 jobs.
PolyStyreneLoop Cooperative launches recycling project
13 November 2017Netherlands: The PolyStyreneLoop (PSL) Cooperative has inaugurated the European expanded polystyrene (EPS) / extruded polystyrene insulation (XPS) industry’s closed-loop project for the recycling of polystyrene (PS) insulation foam waste in Amsterdam. The research is testing a concept to dissolve the recently restricted chemical, Hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD), from PS foam waste while also allowing for the recovery of bromine, which can then be used again for the production of new flame retardants. The PSL project is intended to help the European Union (EU) deal with an expected 20Mt of insulation material containing HBCD that will need to be disposed of in the next 50 years.
The PolyStyreneLoop demonstration plant aims to begin operations in 2018 and will have the capacity to treat up to 3300t/yr of PS waste. Once up and running, the PolyStyreneLoop project will be able to cope with incoming PS foam waste streams and produce recyclate that could be used in new PS foam insulation installations. The new initiative has been financed and built by the 56 members and supporters of the PolyStyreneLoop Cooperative. The EU has also supported it financially.
The association for European Manufacturers of Expanded Polystyrene (EUMEPS) said that recycling PS foam typically saves as much as 50% CO2 emissions compared to using it for energy recovery. It added that it believes that the technology it is testing offers an additional contribution to resource efficiency at the end-of-life phase for PS foam insulation, on top of the CO2 emissions already saved by reducing energy consumption during the long-use phase of a building.