Dow Polyurethanes plans production facility to recycle end-of-life mattresses
Dow Polyurethanes plans to install an industrial scale production facility at Orrion Chemicals Orgaform in Semoy, France.
The RENUVA™ Mattress Recycling Program will take discarded mattress foam and turn it back into raw material (polyol) through chemical recycling, the process of converting waste into feedstock. The new raw material can then be used in flexible or rigid foam products to go into applications such as building insulation boards and even back into new mattresses.
Every year, around 30 million mattresses are thrown away in Europe. If they were all stacked up, the pile would be 678 times the height of Mount Everest1. This new initiative will help enable a more circular economy for polyurethanes by ensuring the applications they are used in can be recycled, and it can help the EU reach its goal of having 65% of municipal waste recycled by 2030.
This new development builds on Dow’s existing collaboration with process know-how and turnkey installations provider H&S Anlagentechnik, announced in 2017.
The installation is expected to take place during the second half of 2020, with the first batch of RENUVA™ polyols expected to be delivered in the first half of 2021. More information can be found here.
