Through loose lay installation and our Recover programme, choosing IVC floors for your social housing project can help you to cut down on waste and contributes to the sustainability of your project.
Our Recover programme takes a regional approach to ensure efficient recycling with minimal transportation impact. In the UK, a local programme collects vinyl installation waste at projects and from contractors and sends it to a recycling partner, where it is downcycled into plastic products.
While this approach doesn't maintain the same material quality as floor-to-floor recycling, it's a great step forward compared to landfill or incineration. It is also impressively flexible.
Our textile backed floors for domestic areas can be installed in most rooms without glue. Thanks to impressive stability and the ability to absorb minor subfloor imperfections, they can simply be cut to fit over existing floors and will stay in place under use.
With no glue needed, they can also be lifted and replaced quickly and easily at change of tenancies without remedial work needed. What's more, old floors can easily be downcycled through our Recover programme.
In 2022, Unilin launched One Home, a group-wide sustainability strategy with ambitious targets in several domains. This means that at IVC, we look into the environmental impact of our products and production processes, but also at how we live at home, at work and on our planet. Unilin has set company-wide emission reduction targets aligned with Paris Agreement goals and validated by SBTi.
Even before the group-wide One Home strategy was established, we've been thinking about how the manufacturing of our products impacts the planet. In fact, as far back as 2013, when the Scheldt cooling project was completed, we've been harnessing natural resources to reduce the fossil-fuel energy we need to make our floors.
We use solar energy to make our fleet greener, in every sense of the word. For instance, we use the power from our solar panels to charge our employees' electric cars and e-bikes. Even the forklifts in our warehouse are charged with solar energy. The result is a great amount of kilometres with zero emissions.
IVC has invested in a bold experiment that uses surface water from the nearby river Scheldt as a secondary coolant. River water is pumped and sent along the closed loop flow of our plant's process cooling water. Using minimal electricity compared to other cooling systems, these innovations have resulted in a 30% increase of energy efficiency in the production of vinyl flooring.
In 2014, three wind turbines were installed on the Avelgem production site. The turbines produce around 11,000 MWh of renewable energy each year. That's about as much as the yearly electricity consumption of 3,000 Flemish households.With this clean energy we power our own production facilities.
