The circular economy at the heart of URSA’s strategy: the manufacturer is launching two new services in this direction

It is in this context that the manufacturer of glass mineral wool and extruded polystyrene is setting up two new services: the reuse of wooden pallets used for the delivery of glass wool panels/rolls products, as well as the recovery of waste scraps. XPS products from its customers, with a view to their reuse in its production lines.

With these new actions, which already complement a wide range of services offered, URSA confirms its commitment to sustainable development and its desire to place the environment at the heart of its activity.

URSA’s CSR approach is an integral part of its business strategy. In terms of the environment, the central pillar of this approach, URSA wishes to work together on two axes: reducing the intensity of its carbon emissions and strengthening its circular economy approach in order to preserve natural resources.

URSA is thus committed to increasing the recycled content of its products and packaging as well as developing solutions for the recovery of its own scraps and those of its customers. Indeed, in alignment with the environmental objectives of the Etex group to which it belongs, by 2030, URSA aims to reduce the intensity of CO35 emissions by 2%, increase the use of recycled materials and reprocessed, as well as zero landfill waste. In this dynamic URSA has launched 2 new dedicated services.

Reusable pallets

To preserve the wood resource, create favorable conditions for reuse and anticipate future regulations by January 2025, dedicated to Industrial and Commercial Packaging Waste (REP DEIC), URSA is deploying a reuse service for its pallets.

Concretely, URSA pallets, distributed with the delivery of products, can be recovered from trading, GSB and construction site customers, by its partner EPALIA, French leader in pallet reuse. The latter is then responsible for sorting them:

• Those that are intact are returned directly to the nearest URSA factory,
• Those that are damaged are repaired and then returned,
• Those which are unusable are recovered, either via material recovery (recycling of the wood material into a raw material: chipboard) or via the Wood-Energy sector.

To optimize this cycle, URSA has designed a new pallet model:

• More robust to maximize the number of rotations,
• With the URSA logo for quick identification,
• With 4 entrances to facilitate handling.

This service will help preserve 8.274 trees per year[1].

Tested since this summer, now available throughout France (excluding Corsica), it is already promising: in a few months, more than 10% of pallets have entered the reuse cycle. The objective is to reuse 50% of URSA pallets within 3 years.

Recovery from falls

Always in this spirit of contributing more to respect for the environment, URSA has also developed a scrap recovery service from XPS, in partnership with ISOVATION, specialist in autonomous isothermal solutions and the cold chain.

It is the intrinsic properties of URSA extruded polystyrene that particularly appealed to ISOVATION: excellent thermal resistance, resistance to freeze/thaw cycles, insensitivity to water and rot resistance: perfect for producing high added value packaging.

This pilot project consists of crushing XPS scrap directly on site using a specific machine, acquired by ISOVATION. URSA then takes care, when delivering XPS to its customer, of recovering them and sending them back to the factory to reinject them into production.

For Fabien CARE, Production Manager at ISOVATION: “The main interest of this project lies in the implementation of a circular economy where our production waste once again becomes a raw material for URSA, our XPS supplier. This collaboration without intermediaries, from the manufacturer to the user, allowed us to quickly implement this reverse logistics. We crush and densify all our XPS scraps to facilitate transport to URSA but also storage at home: the more we densify, the less space the final product takes up, which generates less work. We are delighted with the establishment of this partnership, which allows us to say that our waste has value and that it does not go into nature, which is essential for us. »

After a few months, and in just 3 rotations, more than 4 tons of products have already been collected and reused in production.

For Shadé Olajide, URSA Circular Economy Manager: “The Circular Economy is at the heart of my daily concerns at URSA, so the opportunity to implement this project is a great challenge. The objective now is to duplicate on a larger scale on XPS and mineral wool flows! »

[1] For a return rate of 50%