As creators and innovators, we uphold the belief that we bear a responsibility to ensure our offerings embody sustainability at every stage – from inception to repurposing. This conviction fuels our commitment to developing protocols and strategies that govern our choices and actions.
Embracing circularity means departing from the conventional design paradigm of make, use, dispose, and instead, embracing a model that integrates disposal into the genesis of new creations. Our guiding principles revolve around the three pillars of sustainability – reduce, reuse, and recycle – as we strive to minimise waste generation and reimagine the utility of residual materials.
Recycled materials
One of our key strategies for designing circularly is by incorporating recycled materials. Each of our products contains a proportion of recycled polyester fibre, tailored to meet specific acoustic absorption standards. Our goal is to maximise the use of recycled content while ensuring optimal acoustic performance. This explains the variation in recycled content across our products, ranging from a minimum of 45% all the way up to 80%. To validate our claims, our sustainability team rigorously calculates the annual amount of recycled polyester utilised, a process independently verified according to ISO 14021 standards.
We understand the value of the materials that we have available to us, and that’s why our team is constantly looking to push the capabilities of the materials that we use. We won’t settle for ‘good enough’ and are dedicated to innovating how we manufacture and design sustainably. This has our team working to develop solutions that embody true circularity, addressing the building sector’s imperative to tackle waste management. This work can’t be achieved by one organisation and requires the combined effort of our industry. Working alongside our peers, we can change the way we design, the materials we use, and how we utilise waste.
Manufacturing waste
Annually, our manufacturing processes generate less than 3% waste in the form of trims and off-cuts. While we strive to minimise these trimmings through efficient material usage in our designs, some waste remains inevitable, given current technological limitations.
Acknowledging our ability to influence the waste generated by our products during production, we embarked on thorough testing and research to devise a tailored solution. This endeavour led to the development of a groundbreaking technology, the first of its kind in the industry, capable of converting acoustic panel trimmings into PET pellets for the creation of new accessory products. The integration of this chipper technology into our processes has helped reduce the waste our manufacturing line creates; with ongoing upgrades, we are working towards increasing our operational capacity.
Next steps
Creating a circular economy necessitates the establishment of sustainable policies and practices throughout the manufacturing and construction continuum. As a prominent manufacturer with a worldwide presence, we are committed to integrating sustainable methodologies to foster circularity. Our forthcoming initiatives encompass disseminating our zero-waste manufacturing advancements across all our facilities, expanding our takeback programme to encompass end-of-life products, and instituting a global takeback initiative. We aspire to serve as a catalyst for industry-wide adoption of similar sustainable practices.
