Reasons for fabricators and installers to recycle

Reasons for fabricators and installers to recycle:

• Landfilling waste PVC-U currently costs between £40 and £100 per tonne.
• Landfill tax – currently £24 per tonne – is expected to rise by £8 per tonne each year from April next year to at least 2010/11. It means landfill tax alone and excluding the actual handling charge, will cost around £48 per tonne by 2010/11 – double the current rate.
• Going forward and in many cases already, fabricators have to be able to demonstrate that they are handling their waste responsibly.  The social housing sector is there already and new build private sector and the retail market are both hot on its heels.

David Wrigley, technical director, Dekura

“The recycling of waste PVC-U shouldn’t simply be seen as an opportunity to ‘duck’ landfill tax but to position your business as sustainable, ‘ecologically conscious’ and above all responsible.

“This means recycling not only post production waste but the rapidly increasing volume of old, first generation PVC-U windows that are now being replaced with new advanced products.

“With industry figures suggesting that the vast majority of these early generation- and as many as 300,000 per year - old PVC-U windows are still going to landfill, intercepting this waste stream will be critical if the PVC-U window industry is to fully establish its green credentials.”

Dekura:

• Collecting waste from more than 1,000 window and door fabricators nationwide, Dekura is the largest and the UK’s leading PVC-U recycler.
• Dekura collects and recovers for re-use the equivalent of 19,500 tonnes of PVC-U windows per year.
• No PVC-U ‘waste’ material collected by Dekura goes to landfill.
• Dekura is a fully accredited member of Recovinly.
• Dekura is uniquely placed to offer a complete PVC-U recycling package including both post-consumer waste and fabrication off-cuts – there simply isn’t anyone else doing this in the UK.
• Dekura collects post-industrial waste, for example factory off cuts and mishapes, in specially designed post-industrial cages that can be left with larger fabricators free of charge and collected, weekly or fortnightly, depending on the volumes of post-consumer waste they generate.
• Dekura’s new patented post-consumer green trolley system, like its post-industrial cages, can be left with larger fabricators free of charge. Smaller fabricators can also benefit from the scheme by collecting 100 or more post-consumer frames.
• The green trolleys have been designed to handle a range of old PVC-U fascias, soffits, rainwater goods and windows, providing glass has been removed from them first.
• Dekura has set up a new partnership with Glass recycler Viridor, to collect and process glass if required.
• Dekura has invested heavily in sophisticated sorting facilities, separating all the different materials even down to different colours.
• Dekura offers ‘full cycle traceability’, the passage of every piece of material whether off-cut or old window is fully registered throughout the recycling process. This allows installers, particularly those within the commercial market, to demonstrate an actual and auditable commitment to the recycling of waste material.   
• Dekura has been structured to minimise its environmental and carbon footprint. This includes a regional rather than central network in the Midlands, the North East and regional satellites in the South West and Wales.
• Dekura has also Invested in its logistics operation to take one of our trucks off the road saving more than 100,000 road miles each year, in so doing reducing emissions. Meanwhile the Dekura fleet now only includes the very latest low emission vehicles.

Why PVC-U is the sustainable option:

• The Building Research Establishment (BRE) has given PVC-U a reference service life of 35 years. More impressively still, the British Standards Institute suggests that this extends to in excess of 40 years when manufactured to the accredited standard BS EN 12608.
• Given that research suggests that each PVC-U product can be recycled more than 10 times and still maintain performance, each PVC-U product could have a total life span of 400 years or more, making PVC-U one of the most sustainable materials used by the building industry.
• PVC-U is inert in the environment.
• Leading and advanced systems suppliers are already bringing this material back into use through a variety of products from skinned recycled cills and celluar products to energy efficient reinforcements. For the first time this is closing the loop on the recycling process.

David Wrigley:

“Fabricators and installers are not only under mounting pressure to increase the amount of waste product they recycle but also face spiralling disposal costs.

“Our multi-million pound investment and research in not only our post-industrial but now also our post-consumer recycling facility means we can offer a value added service to our customers in the trade, helping them to not only save on their landfill costs but to strengthen their own green credentials.”