Thanks to the Glass and Glazing Federation (GGF) Group’s recycling scheme, frame recycling is now available to smaller installers as well as the bigger firms, explains Tom Butler, head of sales and marketing for the GGF.
It remains a mystery amongst many industry pundits that the recycling of old frames isn’t a given for every window and door replacement that takes place. Anecdotally, there is little evidence of proactive interest amongst homeowners as to the fate of the frames that are being removed from their homes, despite those same people being reminded of the benefits of recycling at so many touchpoints throughout an average day.
Indeed, we are all compelled by legislation to separate household waste for the express purpose of returning cardboard, plastics and other ‘valuable’ material to the system for re-use, so it remains astonishing that any homeowner would install new windows and doors without guarantees that the old frames would be recycled. And without this imperative, few retail installers bother to actively promote recycling to their customers. Why should they?
Rather than collective care for the planet’s wellbeing, the single biggest driver of PVC-U recycling in recent years has been the well documented global shortages of PVC-U resin, which has resulted in the drive by a number of window systems companies to implement a push on their recycling activities. Accordingly, there has been a scramble for feedstock in the past two years or so, with most of the major systems brands heavily promoting their interest in recovering material to subsidise stocks of virgin material. That it is the right thing to do is secondary.
Against this backdrop, the GGF and its group organisations FENSA and BFRC, launched a PVC-U recycling service that went live in the summer of 2021, now extended to include aluminium a year later. The service is offered as part of the organisation’s commitment to lead from the front with pragmatic, tangible schemes that bring real-world value to its members, whilst also acknowledging that actually, it is good for the environment. The GGF Group’s service is the only national scheme to collect both PVC-U and aluminium from window and door installers, and from site too; no consolidation is required.
The extended GGF Group scheme is now collecting old deglazed aluminium frames and virgin offcuts from fabricators, through a service operated by aluminium recyclers Alutrade, the largest and most established independent aluminium recycling company and extrusion specialist in the UK. The scheme is operated in collaboration with the Council for Aluminium in Building (CAB).
The GGF scheme appears to be working: since the PVC-U service began in the summer of last year, at the time of writing more than 200 tonnes of old PVC-U frames had been collected from the predominantly FENSA Approved Installers that took advantage of free collection from site, through a service operated by CNC Recycling.
Take up by installers especially, might be regarded as a given, the scheme enjoying the trust of established brands GGF, BFRC and FENSA and the convenience of a single point of reference and administration, benefits that combine well with the reduction in disposal costs for the installer. It is hoped also that the collective consciences of the homeowner and the installer are also satisfied when homeowners realise that their old frames will become something useful again as they are carted off from their gardens.
More than anything else however, the GGF Group scheme, especially via its extension to as many as 6,300 FENSA Approved Installers, has brought PVC-U and aluminium frame recycling to within the grasp of smaller installers as well as larger firms that should, as a matter of conscience as well as commercial pragmatism, recycle old frames as a matter of course.
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