Partnership for sustainable slat recycling
In our recycling plant for foamed door slats, we break down used sectional garage doors into their components. The aim is to return as many materials as possible to the recycling loop. The partners at our side: BASF, RAMPF Advanced Polymers GmbH & Co. KG and PUR-Systems GmbH.
Cradle-to-cradle: from the old door to the new slat
The foamed steel slats of our doors consist of a robust steel casing and a heat-insulating polyurethane core. These components are separated from each other in an innovative process. We designed the machine for this ourselves. We feed the steel into the existing metal recycling process, while the PU core is recycled in a multi-stage process.
This is where our partners come into play: in the first step, the rigid foam is handed over to RAMPF Advanced Polymers. The company handles the chemical recycling for us - in other words, converting the PU rigid foam into high-quality recyclate. This recyclate is then delivered to our two suppliers BASF and PUR-Systems.
Both BASF and PUR-Systems mix the recyclate with virgin polyol and use it to produce recycled polyol - a key component for new PU foams: it flows directly into the production of new door slats - without any loss of quality and with a significantly reduced CO₂ footprint compared to pure virgin polyol.
A closed cycle - for the environment and the future
Thanks to close cooperation with our partners, we are able to fully recycle the PU core and thus actively contribute to raw material recovery and waste avoidance. The result is a closed material cycle that follows the principles of cradle-to-cradle and sets standards in the industry: Not only do we avoid waste that would otherwise have been incinerated, we also save the crude oil that would have been needed to produce polyol.