Circular economy
A true circular economy for all materials is our goal. To this end, we are involved in specific projects, for example with the Cradle to Cradle NGO.
Background
Tomorrow's world will function in cycles. Recyclable materials from the so-called "technosphere" must become reusable and must not end up in the biosphere. This is the idea behind "Cradle to Cradle".
- Avoidance: everything that is not created in the first place does not have to be disposed of.
- Returning reusable materials to our factory: what the customer no longer has, does not have to be disposed of either
- Use of raw materials that can be easily disposed of: better to dispose of things for which good recycling processes already exist
- Use of recycled materials: in connection with #3 still much better than disposable plastics
A few examples
We have implemented many starting points over the last 50 years to improve environmental performance and promote circular economy. Here are a few examples:
Wall paint without waste
Our product "The first wall paint without waste" addresses an overdue shortcoming in the paint industry: paint goes to the customer in buckets. The customer then paints something and then throws away buckets of residual paint. If you are lucky, the bucket is recycled. Unfortunately, there is a big difference between mechanical recycling (the use of residual materials) and thermal recycling (i.e. an orderly form of waste incineration). And it’s important to remember that mechanical recycling also costs energy. The silver bullet is to throw away neither buckets nor paint, but to reuse both.
Closing the loop requires two things:
- The reuse of the paint bucket (not "recycling" in the above sense, that would be too short-sighted).
- The extraction of valuable materials from the residual paint and their reintroduction into the production cycle.
Packaging I: Tinplate
If you have to package something (and with paint and cleaners, you can't do without it), then do it with a material that can be easily recycled and for which there are good established recycling systems. Tinplate is recycled in Germany to more than 90% and thus becomes new tinplate. That is why we pack our products in tinplate wherever possible.
Packaging II: Plastic containers made from 100% PCR plastic
Our "Recycled Packaging" project focuses on the products we currently still fill in plastic. We actually prefer tinplate because this material has mechanical recycling rates beyond 90% in Germany and thus a significantly higher recycling rate than all other materials. However, there are a number of products that we cannot fill in tinplate containers. These are in particular cleaners that should in any case be provided with a child-resistant closure and for which the classic can is out of the question for this reason.
- Together with a packaging manufacturer, we have developed a plastic canister that is made of 100% recycled HDPE.
- No production waste is used, but plastics obtained from recycling public waste (so-called post-consumer recycling, PCR).
- The supply of 100% PCR is not yet 100% stable today, but we have decided to start anyway. Therefore, from now on, we will manufacture our canisters – as far as available – only from this recycled plastic.
- The canister can of course be put into the household waste as before, ideally into the yellow garbage can.
Packaging III: Online store packaging
You know how it is: you order online and then a box arrives, inside which is another box, inside which is a plastic blister, in which the product is then packed in plastic bags. This annoyed us so much that we invented a packaging for our online store that saves 50% cardboard and also does without plastic completely. You can read more about this in our sustainability report.
In Production
A lot of waste is generated at the source, for example in production. We have invented a new cleaning process that saves over 80% detergent for our container cleaning and also completely eliminates solvents as cleaning agents (more in this article on timberlove).
More Resources
- Data and considerations for a reusable system for wall paint (link to timberlove.blog)
- Presentation "Wall paint without waste" on pnz.de (link)
- Project paper "Circular economy is possible: wall paint is a good example" (Link)
- All about our new containers made of 100% PCR-HDPE (Link)
