Insulation industry news from Global Insulation

Germany: Knauf Insulation has launched new overwraps on its global insulation product portfolio. The new packaging reduces ink consumption by 70% through its design, featuring a white or off-white base hue and no more than one additional colour. The wraps are designed to maximise ease and efficiency and reduce cost of recycling. This is in line with Knauf Insulation's commitment to recycle over 25% of packaging by 2025. Within the same timeframe, it also aims to reduce its packaging's virgin plastic consumption by 25% and collect over 35% of delivery pallets for repair and reuse or recycling.

US: Ireland-based Kingspan has acquired Minnesota Diversified Products, the producer of the DiversiFoam range of expanded polystyrene (EPS) and extruded polystyrene (XPS) foam and polyisocyanurate (PIR) foam billets. The group says that DiversiFoam will join Kingspan Insulation’s North American division and become a key proponent of its 10-year sustainability programme, Planet Passionate. It plans to expand the company’s Rockford EPS foam plastic recycling plant. Minnesota Diversified Products is committed to recycling 99% of production waste.

Managing Director Doug Crawford said "DiversiFoam and Kingspan are a natural fit from a geographic, technical and cultural perspective. The combination of these two outstanding businesses, coupled with Kingspan’s commitment to further investment will provide our collective customer base, our employees and our business partners with significant value. I am thrilled to welcome the DiversiFoam team into the Kingspan family.”

Germany: BASF is developing a pilot project to make insulation panels from plastics waste as part of its ChemCycling project. The company is making ethylene and propylene from the waste to use as raw material for further chemical manufacturing. Other projects the company is testing using waste plastics with include mozzarella packaging and refrigerator components.

“With our ChemCycling project, we are using plastic waste as a resource. In this way, we create value for the environment, society and the economy. We have joined forces with partners throughout the value chain to establish a working circular model,” said Martin Brudermüller, chairman of the board of executive directors and chief technology officer of BASF.

BASF feeds oil derived from plastic waste by an oiling process into the Production Verbund process. BASF gets this feedstock for the pilot products from Recenso in Germany. As an alternative, syngas made from plastic waste can also be used. The first batch of this oil was fed into the steam cracker at BASF’s site in Ludwigshafen in October 2018. The steam cracker is the starting point for Verbund production. It breaks down or ‘cracks’ this raw material at temperatures of around 850°C. The primary outputs of the process are ethylene and propylene. Under the mass balance approach, the share of recycled raw material can be mathematically allocated to the final certified product. Each customer can select the allocated percentage of recycled material.

BASF is working with its customers and partners, which range from waste management companies to technology providers and packaging producers, to build a circular value chain. Its next step is to make the first products from the ChemCycling project commercially available. However, technological and regulatory conditions need to be met on a regional basis before the project is market-ready.