SUSTAINABILITY
NO WASTE: NO WANT
With the pressing need to place environmental concern as a paramount issue, PVC building product manufacturer Swish Building Products, has a range of green initiatives, as BMJ finds out.
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K manufacturer Swish has invested in process and improvement for over a decade; a move that’s enabled its PVC window, fascia, gutter, and cladding system products to last longer, and prove suitable for effective recycling up to eight times or more.
With an active connection to The Epwin Group Brief – A British Plastics Federation initiative devised to challenge lifecycle costs – a Climate Change Agreement in place with the Environment Agency (EA) and by using the ethics and guidelines proposed by VinylPlus®, Swish has pledged to strive for change and deliver environmentally beneficial results, designed to make a real difference.
Alan Tunnicliffe, the company’s Technical Director, Building Components Division says that, set with an industry sector efficiency target by the EA, Swish was challenged to reduce its energy intensity by 20 percent before the end of 2020; compared to the company’s base-line year of 2008. Currently consuming 30.8 percent less energy than 12 years ago, the manufacturer has
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route; designed to prevent the waste associated with installations from directly entering landfill.” Tunnicliffe says: “We’re proud of our achievement in becoming a zero-landfill operation; committed to recovering the pre-used PVC from our on-site activities for recycling, and separating cardboard, office paper, polythene from packaging, metals and food waste, before any remaining materials are forwarded to a waste partner for general waste recovery.” To enable its products to be ‘continuously’ recycled, Tunnicliffe says that Swish has consistently ensured the PVC used within its building materials comprise high levels of stability and appropriate stabilisers to allow successful extrusion into new PVC articles. “Formulated correctly, PVC products can be recycled many times over as the recycling method required does not measurably damage the chain length of the PVC molecules. The process can prove extremely successful and can enable pre-used products to be repurposed several times,” he says.
Swish achieves its material repurpose process by granulating and pulverising pre-used items to create a fine powder, which is then fed into an extruder, melted, and successfully reformed. Typically, the company recycles its post-consumer PVC windows to create rainwater products, including high quality gutters and downpipes. “As a company, we believe that taking a sustainable, operational approach should be considered a day-to-day function. Our ever- improving manufacturing methods have indisputably minimised our environmental impact and have enabled us to feed directly into The Epwin Group’s brief to challenge industry lifecycle costs,” Tunnicliffe adds.
“We’re constantly striving to do more, and by benefiting from the environmental commitments of our best assets – our employees, merchants, and installers – we will continue to identify further opportunities to help us become even more sustainable.”
already used the EA initiative to position itself ahead of the sector target.
“As an environmentally conscious company, Swish is fully committed to creating a sustainable future and believes that responsibly manufactured PVC can play a harmonious role within that. We’re constantly working with environmental partners towards developing a circular PVC economy and have significantly researched appropriate production methods to support full recyclability.
“By introducing a ‘right first-time’ manufacturing strategy, we’ve succeeded in delivering an efficient and sustainable operating
He adds that, with a focus firmly placed on developing PVC to be a longer lasting and highly reusable material for the future, Swish Building Products is fully committed to creating a more sustainable outlook for itself, and the wider construction industry it supports. “Reducing the Swish carbon footprint has become a key element of our community responsibility, in conjunction with the greater issue of climate change, and we have committed to successfully delivering a further 20 percent reduction in our energy intensity by 2030. “We’re confident that together, we will achieve this goal as we endeavour to research additional routes, methods and practices that will further excel Swish’s Corporate Environment Responsibilities.” BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net May 2022
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