Post Consumer PVC for the building industry

The PoCoBUILD-project fits within the transition domain of Circular Economy. The goal of the project is to completely close the PVC circle for post-consumer PVC waste, originating from window and door profiles.

In order to be able to use post-consumer PVC waste in the production process of window and door profiles (in addition to currently recycled post-production PVC), the following objectives and criteria must be fulfilled:

• Develop additional technologies to process post-consumer PVC waste, compared with the processing of post-industrial or post-fabrication materials and in relation to the end-product requirements.
• A major challenge will be to purify the recycled material in such a way that the recycled material complies with REACH (< 1 w% Pb). It will be evaluated whether lead can be removed through innovative extraction methods and whether it can be incorporated into the new recycling plant (online).
• The recycled material compound should be further optimized to comply with standard specifications: EN 12608-1:2016. Therefore suited additives will be developed.
• The rheological properties of the recycled material have to be tested, and simulation tools have to be translated into new design rules for moulds suitable for the extrusion processing of these materials.

The ultimate goal of this project is to develop new end-products, made of recycled post-consumer PVC (such as window profiles, floor tiles), that comply with the required product specifications.