Germany’s Sport Group (Burgheim; www.sportgroup-holding.com) recently established an artificial turf recycling company, FormaTurf (Essen / Germany; www.formaturf.com), and signed a letter of intent with GBN-Artificial Grass Recycling (GBN-AGR, Utrecht / The Netherlands; www.gbn-agr.nl) to jointly develop infrastructure to reclaim artificial grass in Europe.

With its German sister company, turf maker Polytan (Burgheim; www.polytan.de), FormaTurf plans to offer end-of-life solutions for used turf in Germany through a domestic recycling plant currently under construction in Essen. “The annual capacity of the recycling plant is expected to be 200 full size pitches,” a Sport Group spokesperson told Plasteurope.com, adding that the feedstock for the plant would be procured from within Germany. Discarded turf will be recycled back into new turf systems and other applications mainly for the sports and leisure industry, the company explained.

Eric van Roekel, CEO of GBN-AGR, said the company provides a full guarantee on the quality, and “sets the benchmark for circular processing and a consistent supply of high-quality circular raw materials”.

Last year, the European Chemical Agency’s risk assessment committee (RAC) recommended a complete ban on microplastics as infill material on synthetic turf (see Plasteurope.com of 18.06.2020), while UK’s AMI (www.ami.international) said it expects the global artificial grass market, which was hit hard by the pandemic, to bounce back by 2022 (see Plasteurope.com of 22.06.2020).