Insulation industry news from Global Insulation

Spain: Knauf Insulation has called on Spain, as the current president of the Council of the European Union, to further decarbonise building stock in the region.

Oscar Del Rio, the general manager of Knauf Insulation Iberia, said “The outcome of domestic politics may still be uncertain at the moment, but on the international stage, Spain holds the presidency of the Council of the European Union until the end of December 2023 and its focus must be crystal clear. Europe needs to seize the opportunity of the recast of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) to ensure an approach that will decarbonise its building stock by increasing renovation rates and committing to quality retrofit standards that deliver real performance.”

The insulation producer cited research by the Building Performance Institute (BPIE), which it supported, that found that insulating all Europe’s residential buildings would cut energy demand for space heating by 44%, compared to 2020, making a ‘significant’ contribution to energy security and the EU’s 2050 climate goals. The company has also urged policy makers to introduce ‘one-stop shops’ for renovation to enable building owners to make retrofitting easier and to use digital tools to make it easier for people to view potential performance savings.

The company used Spain as an example of a country that needs a more ambitious renovation strategy. It noted that, according to Spain’s Energy Renovation of the Building Sector strategy, 9.7 million homes or 50% of residential buildings were built before 1980 and an additional one million are described as in a poor or dilapidated condition. In addition, 81% of existing buildings are in the E, F or G emissions categories and 84.5% are in these categories for energy consumption. It quoted research by Renovate Europe that found that the renovation rate of buildings in Spain was eight to 10 times lower than the average for neighbouring countries.

Belgium: PU Europe has issued a statement to the relevant European bodies responsible for fluorinated gases (F-gases) emphasising the role of low global warming potential (GWP) of F-gases in insulation foam applications.

The association has suggested that, instead of total ban of F-gases, a lowering of the threshold should be considered as an alternative. In its view a lower threshold would allow the users of thermal insulation to continue to benefit from products made from closed-cell polyurethane foam. It warned that a ban on the use of low GWP F-gases in insulation foam would have “significant implications for the Renovation Wave, as approximately 80% of the buildings that will exist in 2050 have already been constructed.” PU Europe emphasises the need to find solutions that strike the right balance between addressing operating greenhouse gas emissions from the existing building stock and controlling low GWP F-gases.

The European Commission proposed in early 2022, as part of its so-called 'fit for 55' package, to further reduce emissions of F-gases. It wants to change the existing quota system, gradually reducing the supply of hydrofluorocarbons to the European Union market to 2.4 % of 2015 levels by 2048.

PU Europe was founded in 1981 as BING to become the single European voice for the polyurethane insulation industry. The association represents insulation producers, raw material suppliers and component manufacturers from eleven countries with activities covering the entire continent.

Europe: Knauf Insulation has joined Daikin, Danfoss, Rockwool, Saint-Gobain, Signify and Velux to promote building energy efficiency in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The six companies have signed a memorandum that commits them to work together to encourage cooperation and allocation of ‘personal and financial resources’ on a country level to establish and maintain national associations equipped with the expertise to engage in public debates effectively and the skills to inspire better policies.

Radek Bedrna, Knauf Insulation’s managing director for Eastern Europe and Middle East, said “This memorandum is a powerful commitment to tackle the building and energy challenges facing CEE. It will provide the campaigning initiatives with the needed support to drive the policy changes that will be transformational for building renovation in the region.” He added that the region has five out of seven European Union (EU) countries with the highest gas saving potential arising from insulating residential buildings. Two thirds of the 43.6m homes in single- and multi-family house in the CEE region were reportedly built before 1989 and are energy inefficient.

The companies signed the document at the Central and Eastern European Energy Efficiency Forum (C4E) in late May 2023. The forum, which brought together more than 240 public authority representatives with advocacy groups, non-government organisations (NGO) and private companies, called on policy makers to roll out well-designed subsidy schemes with a long-term outlook.

UK: SIG recorded full-year sales of Euro2.1bn in 2020, down by 13% year-on-year on a like-for-like basis. In the fourth quarter of 2020, sales rose by 5% in the EU, by 2% in the UK and by 4% overall. The group said that this reflects the initial impact of its Return to Growth strategy. The strategy has delivered increased organic sales, supported by ‘robust demand’ in the Repair, Maintenance and Improvement segment. The company noted France and the UK as robust markets within the segment. It said that profitability improved throughout the second half of 2020, with ‘solid’ performance in the EU. Estimated full-year costs were Euro25m.

The group said “Whilst the evolving Covid-19 backdrop will continue to create uncertainty in the short term, the fundamentals of the group’s markets remain sound and the strong recovery in demand across territories and sectors through the second half was encouraging. Providing there is no material disruption to either our business or end markets as a result of the pandemic, the board expects the near-term benefits of the actions taken in 2020 to deliver organic revenue growth in 2021, including market share gains. The benefits of this will become increasingly evident as the year progresses and should enable us to return to underlying operating profitability during the second half.”

Ireland/UK: Mannok says that it has undertaken extensive preparatory measures to help its operations transition smoothly when the Brexit transition period ends on 31 December 2020. While keeping operations unchanged, the group has formed new legal entities such as Mannok GB, which will deal with UK customers. The group acknowledged that prices would depend on the future tariff arrangement between the UK and the EU, but would remain in line with market pricing. It added that the same effects would impacts competitors, who import significant amounts of raw materials from Europe.

The group said that it has been working closely with suppliers for over 18 months to ensure the security of its supply chains. It has capacity at its sites to store enough raw materials for polyisocyanurate (PIR) insulation for a ‘number of weeks’’ of production.

Chief financial officer Dara O’Reilly said, “A key priority for us in all of this was to ensure that the service we can provide to our customers in a post-Brexit environment is as seamless as possible. We’ve made the changes to our structures; we’ve made the changes to how we operate and as a result of that, regardless of the outcome of the Brexit negotiations, we’re ready.”

Hungary: Bodrogi Bau is upgrading its polystyrene insulation plant in Szeged. It is spending Euro3m on building two new production lines, according to the MTI-Eco news agency. One of the new lines will be used to manufacture polystyrene insulation blocks. The project is supported by a Euro1.5m grant from the European Union (EU) and the local government. The company runs businesses in construction, building material retail, planning and real estate.

Belgium: Recticel is coordinating the four-year PUReSmart project that was launched on 1 January 2019. The project will look at ways of recycling polyurethane (PU) and turning it into a circular material. It is supported by Euro6m in funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme.

PUReSmart plans to recover over 90% of end-of-life PU with the goal of converting it into inputs for new and known products. The project consortium will develop sorting technologies to separate a diverse range of PU materials into dedicated feedstocks. These feedstocks will be broken down into their basic components as inputs for existing PU products, and as raw materials for a newly designed polymer that merges the durability of thermosets with the circularity of thermoplastics.

The PUReSmart consortium is an end-to-end collaboration spanning the entire polyurethane reprocessing value chain, and comprises both industrial players and dedicated research partners. As well as Recticel the other partners on the project include Covestro Deutschland, BT-Wolfgang Binder, WeylChem InnoTec, Ecoinnovazione, Ghent University, KU Leuven, Universidad De Castilla – La Mancha and Ayming.

Belgium: The European Insulation Manufacturers Association (Eurima) has supported a European Parliament vote approving a 35% European Union (EU) energy efficiency target. The adopted proposals on the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) and the EU Governance regulation has also strengthen Article 7 (Energy Efficiency Obligation Schemes).

“With yesterday’s votes, ‘Energy Efficiency First’ now starts to become more than a slogan. When 76% of our efforts towards COP21 must come from energy efficiency, tapping into the savings resting in the buildings sector we are cost-effectively bridging the gap between reality and the COP21 objectives. In this respect, the outcomes of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, EED and EU Governance show that the Parliament is ready to send a strong signal to the Council,” said Jan te Bos, the Director General of Eurima.

Netherlands: 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.

Germany: Va-Q-Tec AG is hosting a research project entitled ‘THECore’ that will examine thermally efficient, cost-reduced nanostructured foams for vacuum insulation panels (VIP). The project is linked to the Society and Enterprise Panel of the Individual Fellowship of Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) of the European Union (EU). The main research topic of THECore is the development of new VIP products based on a new generation of core materials. Sumteq, the project’s second supporting company, will supply these.

Va-Q-Tec will carry out product tests and qualifications of the new materials. A starting meeting with both participant institutions was held on 22 June 2017, where researcher Flávia Almeida from Portugal introduced the main objectives of the project. She will lead the research for two years and will be supported by the MSCA.

MSCA are a set of major mobility research grants created by the EU and European Commission to support research in the European Research Area. It is currently financed through the Eighth Framework Program for Research and Technological Development (Horizon 2020) and belongs to the so-called first pillar ‘Excellent Science.’