Heraklith® has long put sustainability at the heart of everything we do
Our products contribute to saving energy, cutting emissions, and are designed to make sure buildings are good for the environment and safe and comfortable for those who use them. Our products are also made from one of the world’s best renewable resources, wood.
Now Heraklith® has been highlighted as a leading example of the Knauf Insulation global sustainability strategy For A Better World.
The Knauf Insulation annual report, For A Better World – Insulation Matters Annual Review 2020, features Heraklith’s successful recycling of multilayer waste.
The elimination of significant quantities of production waste that used to end up in landfill has been achieved thanks to cooperation between our plants at Simbach and St Egidien in Germany and our central technical department.
Material dust, produced during the manufacture of Heraklith® Wood Wool multilayer panels, can now be separated and the Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) and Wood Wool residues collected for recycling.
The Rock Mineral Wool sawdust from Simbach in Bavaria is sent to St Egidien in Saxony where it is cleanly and efficiently processed into a new Rock Mineral Wool product. The process now saves more than 1,700 tonnes of waste per year which previously went to landfill.
The project is not only a commendable example of great cooperation between two plants with different technologies; it also marks a significant contribution to enabling a circular economy and reducing the amount of waste that goes into landfill.
"This is a huge step forward for Wood Wool and shows the incredible strength of the group to work together to find solutions - especially the collaboration between the plants and the central technical teams during the years of development," says Joachim Wieltschnig, our Technical Director Wood Wool.
Across our company, Heraklith® has been working on all three pillars of sustainability for over a decade.
We have focused on zero harm, reducing our energy use and emissions, recycling our production waste, incorporating circular economy principles and constantly campaigning for better and more sustainable buildings.
In an accompanying video, he explains that one of the four main goals of our new sustainability strategy For a Better World is to establish a circular economy. “More recycling is one of the keys to making a circular economy possible,” he says.
In a foreword to the Knauf Insulation report, Jean-Claude Carlin, Member of the Knauf Group Management Committee Insulation Europe/Middle East/Asia, says that in many respects, the timing of our strategy could not be more significant.
“COVID-19 has not only been a stark reminder of the frailty of the world, it has also challenged us to create something better. To build back better. At Knauf Insulation sustainability has always been indispensable to our long-term growth. We are proud of our achievements, but we are now determined to be even more ambitious,” he says.