When waste becomes new raw material

When waste becomes new raw material:
REHAU Brazil launches take-back concept for edgebands

Breaking new ground and building sustainable processes from nothing - Ronald Welzel is an application engineer at REHAU Interior Solutions in São Paulo and has launched a concept to give edgeband scraps a new life. With this project, he reclaims discarded PVC edgebands from the market to recycle them and feed them into the production of new edgebands. However, the first steps on the road to a more sustainable future in the Brazilian furniture industry were not easy: while recycling has already been implemented in Europe since the 1990s, for example in the window industry, Brazil is still at the beginning. As a result, processes have yet to be created and structures have yet to be established.

A pilot project as a first step

Ronald is therefore entering new territory with his pilot project and is first confronted with many questions. "Trends are only slowly building up here to minimise the amount of PVC in the country. One possibility would be circular economy via recycling of PVC waste," he explains. Circular economy refers to taking back, processing and reusing materials, and succeeds primarily through cooperation. This is because it requires a good network of partners who professionally clean and process the residuals or take care of the logistics. "However, we do not yet have any sophisticated take-back concepts, networks or the like. That was a challenge," adds Ronald.

Opening doors in the Brazilian market

Together with the local sales manager in the state of São Paulo, Michelangelo Brunetti, Ronald looked for individual local solutions to get a recycling concept off the ground. With the help of his European colleagues from the furniture and window sectors, he first shimmied his way through the bureaucratic jungle and successfully insisted with the Instituto Brasileiro do PVC (IBPVC), the Brazilian PVC Institute.

Through a wholesaler in São Paulo, Ronald and Michelangelo have now succeeded for the first time in taking back discarded REHAU PVC decors that had been removed from their collection by some panel manufacturers. A good two tonnes of material were collected. It is now being divided into color groups and crumbled at the plant in São Paulo. Detailed reproduction tests are currently underway. "If it is technically qualifiable and financially justifiable, we'll have been one of the first to prove that PVC recycling can open new doors for the furniture industry in the Brazilian market as well," Ronald says proudly

Ronald Welzel, Interior Solutions application engineer in São Paulo, Brazil, courageously clears every bureaucratic hurdle in order to promote recycling and the circular economy with REHAU.

Recycling of unused edgebands in Europe

A take-back concept for the recycling of unused edgebands has also recently been introduced in Europe. This is because it is impossible to prevent unused edgeband stocks from accumulating on the market due to incorrect orders, remaining quantities or collection changes. So that these do not have to be scrapped, REHAU now takes back unused edgebanding material in its original packaging in various European countries. We sort the edging material and process it into granules. We then use the recycled material to manufacture products from the REHAU product range again. The concept conserves resources and avoids CO2 emissions. In this way, our Interior Solutions division is taking another important step towards the circular economy.

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