ISOVER chooses Excoffier Recyclage to announce the launch of a glass wool recycling chain!
ISOVER, a Saint-Gobain brand, is one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of glass wool, a flagship insulation product for the building industry. Committed to recycling its production off-cuts for over twenty years at its Oxymelt plant in Orange, ISOVER wanted to structure a recycling chain for “post-consumer” glass wool from renovation sites and routine deconstruction operations. The aim is to increase the proportion of
recycled raw materials in the composition of its insulation products.
To build up this innovative chain, which is a world first, ISOVER has surrounded itself with a network of recycling professionals, with a challenge to meet: collecting, sorting, preparing and packaging the material for shipment to the Orange plant, where it will be transformed into a new product.
On the scale of the construction sector, glass wool waste, with an annual volume of 75,000 tonnes, represents a rather small part of the overall volume (0.2% of construction waste and 0.75% of finishing waste). Until now, this waste, which had no channel, was directed towards disposal solutions.
Several companies in the PRAXY network, such as Excoffier Recyclage and Sclavo Environnement, have become involved in this project, with a view to taking recycling one step further by diverting as many flows as possible from landfill. ISOVER chose the Groisy site of Excoffier Recyclage (Haute-Savoie) to officialize the launch of this new process, which will in future have to meet the logistical challenge of extending to other regions, further away from the Orange plant.