NATURELOOP
Trocellen’s NATURELOOP portfolio is designed with the goal of minimizing negative environmental impacts and promoting long-term ecological balance.
These applications aim to meet the environmental needs of our planet without compromising the ability of providing high quality, stable performance, lightweight and long-lasting solutions for our customers and the society.
The NATURELOOP brand incorporates the Trocellen Group’s products that demonstrate and reflect our commitment to environmental responsibility and the continuous innovation to provide sustainable solutions. The Trocellen Group’s goal is that by 2025 all new products will be ecodesigned. In order to achieve our carbon neutrality goal, the continuous improvement of our product portfolio is at the core of our corporate environmental footprint reduction activities.
The TC Group’s sustainability strategy has 2 main ambitions for the environmental pillar:
- Reducing the impact of climate change – preserving the NATURE
- Contributing to circular economy – building the LOOP
Sustainable products
New products and solutions at Trocellen are developed using Ecodesign principles and processes.
The traditional focus on energy efficiency and waste reduction during the manufacturing process is no longer considered being sufficient to provide sustainable products, as relevant elements of the product life cycle are left out of scope. Trocellen chose to implement Ecodesign thinking into the product development process to combine best performance with the lowest possible environmental footprint generated through the entire product life cycle. Ecodesign is considered as an integrated aspect in the product development process.
The cornerstones of our sustainable product development and ecodesign thinking are:
- Complete integration with the company’s sustainability policy
- Development and introduction of a science based tool for the LCA analysis of all Trocellen products
- Full involvement and commitment of all Trocellen colleagues taking decisions on the different product life cycle stages
Through combining Ecodesign thinking with the new Trocellen LCA-tool (a science based environmental impact analysis tool) the company is able to use the competence and knowledge of the Trocellen employees to create ideas for improvement, evaluate them precisely and decide for the most environmentally friendly options.
This understanding is the base to strive for options to reduce the environmental impact by avoiding, reducing or substituting materials, technologies and processes. Knowledge of the actually in use methods for analyzing and declaring product environmental footprints (PEF, EPD, PCF, etc) are of key importance to provide reliable information to customers and other stakeholders and avoid green-washing.
As Circularity is one of the key factors to reduce the environmental footprint of a product it is also a clear target for Trocellen not only to challenge its suppliers for improving their production processes but also to look into life cycle stages like transport, use phase, recycling and end-of-life for possibilities to reduce the environmental impact.
On the way to a sustainable production and a circular economy in the TROCELLEN Group, the use of recycled and bio-based materials has become a very high priority. Beside using these materials in our product portfolio, the proof of sustainable origin has to be ensured.
With the ISCC PLUS certification we and our chosen suppliers can ensure a full traceability along the entire supply chain on all kinds of bio-based feedstocks.
Beside physical segregation, mass balance is a widely used approach in the chemical industry and commonly used for polymers. It makes it possible to track the amount of sustainable content in the value chain and declare it on a mathematically basis to a final product. An additional benefit of this approach can be the unchanged quality of the foam.
The ISSC PLUS certification follows some predefined and transparent rules and every company is audited regularly by an independent certification body.
Please find more details here: https://www.iscc-system.org/
Our certified plants and certificates are listed here.
We can offer chemical and physical crosslinked foam solutions under the ISCC PLUS certification, please get in contact with our sales or technical team to discuss your needs and ideas.
Sustainable materials
RePE Solution
When Recyled Polyethylene contributes to reduce the environmental footprint.
The Trocellen RePe solution is a great addition to the company’s sustainable product portfolio. It contributes significantly to Trocellen’s sustainability efforts and the partners’ commitment towards environmental balance and responsible operations.
Trocellen RePe solutions are made with recycled polyethylene, which contributes to reducing the overall environmental footprint of the product, therefore supporting the fight against climate change
and limiting the effects of global warming.
The production of 1 kg LDPE based on chemical recycling results in 55% less emissions than producing it based on fossil feedstock. Each kg of fossil LDPE being substituted by chemically recycled LPDE used for Trocellen RePe foams’s production reduces the emissions by 0,86 kg CO2-eq.
Source: plasticenergy.com, report 09/2020
The lowered environmental footprint of the Trocellen RePe solutions comes from the limited CO2 emissions during the production of recycled polyethylene compared to fossil-based virgin polyethylene. Further benefits that make these customized solutions a more sustainable choice:
Environmental footprint decrease:
- Better stewardship of non-renewable materials
- Avoid landfilling of waste
- Avoid emissions coming from incineration of waste
- Energy conservation
- One step towardsCircular economy
Trocellen repe is a great, sustainable solution for a large variety of applications.
The evaluation process is already completed for N-foam types in the density range between 30 to 200 Kg/m3.
These products are tested for a recycled raw material content up to:
- 30% of chemically recycled PE
- 20% of mechanically recycled PE
Trocellen RePe solutions also support compliance with increasingly stringent regulatory requirements (new EU legislations for mandatory recycled content, industry specific standards and certifications, such as LEED certification in the construction and development industry and WELL Building Standard).
Upon request Trocellen RePe solutions are provided with
- self-declarations of the recycled content according to the EN ISO 14021 standard
- life-cycle analysis about the environmental impacts of the solution.
These support the customers’ professional planning and reporting as well as the clear and transparent communication about the solutions’ environmental impacts.
Trocellen RePe can be used for our key industries: Automotive, Footwear, Insulation, Packaging and Sport (also covering artificial turf shock pad and tatami products).
For detailed product list and specific offer please contact us.
Custom-made solutions – with the recycled raw material based products we offer customer-specific solutions:
- relying on Trocellen Group ecodesign product development taking
- into account the exact product specifications and
- our customers’ sustainability strategies and activities.
Let’s work together for a more sustainable value chain and future!
Did you know how recycled PE is produced?
- Mechanical recycling
- Solvent-based recycling
- Chemical recycling
To know more, click here: Recycling of PE
Biobased solutions
High performance with low environmental footprint
TR-EEcell is Trocellen’s biobased foam. Products contain raw materials derived from biomass, still look, behave and feel like the fossil based plastic products.
Having biomass as raw material for our TR-EECell foams provides great environmental benefits:
- Renewable resource use: Using regenerative raw material (plant based) decrease the need for non-renewable fossil resource usage
- Fight against climate change: Life cycle analyses show that biobased plastics enable a significant CO2 saving compared to virgin plastics. Figures are depending on the feedstock being used, product composition, the application and also the end-of-life treatment.
– Significant CO2 decrease coming from the plants grow phase, as the plants use CO2 as a building block, they capture it from the atmosphere as they grow.
Biobased raw material could come with negative environmental impacts like deforestation, land use and negative impacts on soil and water, therefore it is important to use only feedstock from certified sources, proving the lowest possible environmental impact.
Alternative feedstock for a conscious product development
There are different feedstock options to produce biobased plastics. Trocellen Group does not promote the use of first generation feedstock as it is in direct competition with food production, instead preferring suppliers who are focusing on using second-generation feedstock, made of non-food biomass, whilst monitoring all upcoming alternative feedstock opportunities (other second and third generation feedstock).
Feedstock sourcing in the supply chain: sustainable, transparent, responsible and trusted
Trocellen Group’s responsibility is to ensure a supply chain where no possible negative impact can override the benefits of the usage of the biobased raw material product. Trocellen Group has set up its’ supplier engagement process to enable trusted communication with the key suppliers, to ensure, that our partners are working with the same motivation towards the creation of more sustainable products.
To ensure the transparency of the processes our plants where we produce TR-EECell products have International Sustainability and Carbon (ISCC) certifications.
We also we adopted the (3rd party) DIN CERTCO certification, in order to get stated what is the actual amount of that content of the specific TR-EEcell type, in the range of 20-50%, 50-85% or >85%.
Did you know how bio-based PE is produced?
The process of exploiting the sugar cane usually involves five squeezing steps: The juice from the first two steps is destined for the production of brown sugar for human consumption, while the remaining three steps generate a less valuable juice and not suitable for the production of food sugar. The ethanol necessary for our foam comes from fermented sugar cane juices extracted during the last three squeezing steps, therefore unsuitable for human consumption. From the polymerization of this ethanol the polymers necessary for the production of bio-based PE foam are obtained. Furthermore, even the remaining parts of the sugar cane are not wasted: the final residues of the juices (bagasse) are incinerated, thus producing energy used in the production process of sugar and ethanol and thus giving a further and significant contribution to sustainability.