Insulation industry news from Global Insulation

Germany: Cemex Zement has launched Insularis cement-free concretes, a product range suitable for use in building insulating components. The range includes lightweight concretes Insularis Supra and Insularis Infra. Due to its low bulk density, Insularis Infra currently requires special case-by-case or project-related approval for use in Germany. The company said that it produces Insularis concretes from a mix of recycled and natural raw materials. It added that Insularis is itself 100% recyclable.

Austria: Austrotherm has launched a nationwide extruded polystyrene (XPS) insulation cut-off collection service. The service will pick up waste XPS insulation from building sites for recycling in production at Austrotherm’s Purbach XPS insulation plant.

Technical director Heimo Pascher said “Our XPS sheets are ideal for recycling and can be fed back into the production process - this enables us to reduce CO₂ emissions and the consumption of resources in production. We are taking an important step in the direction of the circular economy.” He added “We have carefully analysed the savings effect. By recycling we reduce the CO₂ emissions in the disposal of construction site waste by at least 50%. With every tonne of XPS which we recycle, 1.80t of CO₂ can be saved. Or, to put it more impressively, every tonne of XPS that we recycle from construction sites saves as much CO₂ as around 148 European beech trees bind in a year.”

Slovakia: US-based Johns Manville has commissioning of a 3t/hr glass fibre recycling unit at its Trnava engineered product plant. The company says that the facility will recycle waste glass fibres from continuous filament glass fibre recycling, reducing landfill waste by 10,000t/yr. The total cost of the installation is around Euro10m.

Europe/Asia environment, health and safety manager Elena Hrivikova said, “The primary goal of this investment is to achieve a tangible positive environmental impact by drastically reducing the landfilling of glass fibre waste. This project is part of our response to the European Commission’s Zero Waste programme and our overall target for sustainable management of the planet’s natural resources.”

Johns Manville’s Engineering Products division manufactures synthetic and glass fiber nonwoven products for construction such as insulation and gypsum board facers.

North America: A survey by the North American Insulation Manufacturers Association (NAIMA) shows that its members used around 1.17Mt of recycled glass to produce residential, commercial and industrial thermal and acoustical insulation in 2018. The survey included data from both US and Canadian production plants. Producers also used over 0.45Mt of recycled blast furnace slag in the production of thermal and acoustic insulation.

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.

US: PhytoGen, part of Corteva Agriscience and DowDuPont, is partnering with Cotton Incorporated’s Blue Jeans Go Green denim recycling program to turn used clothing into insulation. PhytoGen will be collecting used denim at various events throughout 2019.

“New seed technologies and the commitment of US cotton growers continue to make sustainable production gains, while the Blue Jeans Go Green denim recycling program addresses end-of-product-life sustainability,” said Stacey Gorman, Director of Communications for The Cotton Board.

To raise awareness for the program, PhytoGen and Corteva Agriscience started holding internal denim drives at their corporate offices and seed production locations in November 2018. With the support of the National FFA Foundation and local FFA chapters, this will now be expanded to collection drives across the Cotton Belt in early 2019 and collections will be organised at trade events.

Since its start in 2006, the Blue Jeans Go Green program has collected more than 2 million pieces of denim and over 350,000m² of insulation has been upcycled from worn denim. Over 40 Habitat for Humanity affiliates have received denim insulation and more than 1000t of textile waste have been diverted from landfills. Corporate partnerships with the Blue Jeans Go Gerent program predominately have been with retailers and brands that offer a sales incentive for recycling used denim. Past partners include: Wrangler, Gap, American Eagle, J Crew and Madewell.

UK: Plans by Knauf Insulation and Veolia to tackle complains about the ‘offensive’ odour from a glass-recycling unit at Knauf’s St Helens mineral wool plant have been approved by the local council. The proposals include introducing a wet scrubber and extending the current dryerstack to 30m from 13m, according to the St Helens Star newspaper. These measures were suggested following an assessment with Odournet. Local residents have made complaints about the Veolia-run unit since it became operation in October 2017.

France: 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.

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.