Pioneering renewable materials in manufacturing

Our pursuit of creating a smaller environmental footprint, we focus a lot of effort to finding new materials which can used to both create a better and a more sustainable world but has strong circular thinking about it. Our colleague Tony Svensson is the one at ROL who is responsible for finding and innovating in these areas. He has put together a list of future materials that are currently being looked.

Living materials?

Polymeric foam or Styrofoam is a very commonly used in packaging. Big boxes can have several kilos of Styrofoam. Finding an alternative would be a big win for the environment because its both hazardous to create and it degrades very slow in nature. There are ofcourse alternatives like paper or fiber solutions, but its not always that they work together with bigger products.

What we now are looking into is the possibility to have a specific mushroom foam. The materials acts like Styrofoam but it’s organic and we would grow it into fixtures at our facilities. The end product is bio-degradable.

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ECO Polyester Powder colors made of PET bottles?

We are in the stages of trying out a new type of powder color using recycled bottles.

By using a Polyester powder made of 25% recycled pet bottles when used Polyester and 12,5% when used a mixed would double the value for the environment and lower the price at the same time. This change would lower the CO2 with approx. 34 453 kg.

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Reuse of old textile and cloths

We have a project together with a client which is one of the bigger clothing companies where we are looking into the possibility to create a new board material with used textile. The prototype is made of 70% recycled textile. These sheets could replace the shelfs in the stores and in the future the possibilities are endless.

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