With its voluntary commitment, the European PVC industry has VinylPlus® has set specific targets for recycling. The industry is also particularly committed to the principles of sustainability and resource efficiency at a national level as part of its product responsibility and contributes to achieving the targets in Europe. In the construction products sector, PVC recycling has long been the material of choice. The recyclates obtained are reprocessed into new construction products.
Under the motto "Experience PVC recycling live", VinylPlus Deutschland e.V., Bonn, is organising a series of information events for trade media to show how recycling works in practice.
The event kicked off on 13 June with a focus on PVC flooring recycling in Troisdorf. The co-operation partners were Gerflor Mipolam GmbHone of the world's leading manufacturers of resilient floor coverings, and the PVC Floor Covering Recycling Working Group (AgPR)which has been operating a recycling plant at the same site for over 30 years.
"The aim of today's action day is to demonstrate and explain the technical processes of PVC recycling in the flooring sector in practice. On site at Gerflor's production facility and at AgPR's recycling plant, we will show how the PVC flooring industry closes the material loop from production to recycling and reuse," says Thomas Hülsmann, Managing Director of VinylPlus Germany.
"Many of our floor coverings already consist of a very high proportion of recycled material. Gerflor recycles up to 100 1TP3 tonnes of its production waste in line with the principle of the circular economy," reported Head of Marketing Frank Selbeck. The company has also launched the "Second Life" recycling programme especially for the flooring trade. Gerflor partners have the opportunity to collect offcuts and have them picked up. These are then processed in the company's own recycling centres at the respective production sites so that they can be fed directly back into production. "Thanks to consistent product recycling, we have already collected, processed and returned over 50,000 tonnes of waste material to production in 2020 - by 2025, the target is 60,000 tonnes," says Selbeck.
In addition, as a co-founder of AgPR, Gerflor established a recycling and reutilisation system that works throughout Germany over 30 years ago, setting the course for resource-saving material cycles at an early stage. "AgPR collects used PVC flooring throughout Germany and with logistics partners in some neighbouring European countries as part of demolition or renovation measures. The old floor coverings delivered to our recycling plant in Troisdorf are processed into finely ground material as part of a technically advanced process after other materials have been sorted out. If suitable, this can then be used in the production of new PVC construction products," explained AgPR Managing Director Dr Jochen Zimmermann.
As the latest VinylPlus progress report shows, the programme recycled 1,772 tonnes of PVC flooring across Europe last year in the post-consumer sector and 1,743 tonnes in the pre-consumer sector through initiatives such as AgPR, Recofloor and GBR. "A general advantage of PVC construction products in terms of resource efficiency is that they are very easy to recycle at the end of their long life. This is reflected not least in the successful, Europe-wide recycling balance of VinylPlus," emphasised Hülsmann. The European PVC industry's voluntary commitment has formed the long-term sustainability framework for the entire value chain since 2000. In 2022, a total of 813,266 tonnes of PVC waste was recycled and processed into new products in Europe as part of VinylPlus. Since 2000, a total of 8.1 million tonnes have been recycled, saving over 16 million tonnes of CO2-emissions could be saved.
