In a move aimed at raising its recycling activities and strengthening its commitment to the environment, plastics processor Rehau (Rehau / Germany; www.rehau.de) has installed a new recycling plant at its site in Srem / Poland. Following eight months of construction, the line was commissioned in mid-June. At the heart of the new facility stands a high-performance precision sorting unit supplied by Hamos, able to accurately separate the raw materials from old building profiles. The expansion at the site comes to about 1,250 m², and the new line has a throughput of about 10,000 t/y of PVC profiles. Twelve employees in Srem are engaged in recycling PVC profile sections and production scrap from the plastic windows industry.

The recycled material is later extruded into the core of new window profiles. The resulting PVC windows have the same quality and technical properties as those made of virgin material, Rehau says.

Rehau purports to have been the first company in this sector to introduce its own recycling concept, which dates back to 1988, and which permitted the recycling of old PVC windows and profile sections. In 2011 the company joined Rewindo Fenster-Recycling-Service (Bonn / Germany; www.rewindo.de), a recycler operating throughout Germany, thereby “integrating” recycling into its production processes, including at the design stage itself.