Desso Wins Guardian Sustainable Business Award for Waste and Recycling

Informations

• Publié par: desso-group-bv
• Nombre de lectures: 16
• Langue: English

Extrait

Desso Wins Guardian Sustainable Business

Award for Waste and Recycling

PR Newswire

WAALWIJK, The Netherlands, May 30, 2012

WAALWIJK,

The Netherlands

,

May 30, 2012

/PRNewswire/ --

On

May 29

, Desso, a leading European carpet and sports surfaces

company won the 2012 Guardian Sustainable Business Award for the

Waste and Recycling category for its implementation of Cradle to

Cradle

®

design in its business strategy. It was up against two other

shortlisted companies, BAM Nuttall and Coca-Cola Enterprises

.

"This is a fantastic endorsement of all the hard work the people at Desso have

undergone to transform our business," says Stef Kranendijk, CEO of Desso. "I

am especially delighted because the Guardian Sustainable Business Awards

recognise entries that have made a real impact and look for business models

that can be replicated. We have found that the Cradle to Cradle® strategy

boosts our profits and innovation but it also helps us deal with the most

pressing environmental challenges we face as a society. And we hope it will be

adopted by others, so that together we can achieve scale in going beyond

sustainability."

"We are moving away from the linear economy of 'take, make and dispose'

towards the circular economy," adds Kranendijk, "As estimated in a new report

from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation this represents an economic opportunity

of up to

$630 billion

per year in

Europe

or almost 4% of the EU's annual

GDP."

[1]

Since 2008, Desso has been embedding a Cradle to Cradle

®

strategy into its

business model, whereby it designs products for disassembly and recycling. The

aim of Cradle to Cradle

®

is to redesign the way we make things so that our

products consist of positively defined materials

[2]

which can be recycled on an

infinite basis.

In 2010, Desso received a Cradle to Cradle

®

Silver certificate for an entire

carpet tile product with its new carpet tile backing Desso EcoBase

®

. Due to its

innovative composition, Desso EcoBase

®

's polyolefin-based layer is fully

recyclable in Desso's own production process.

Carpet tiles with Desso EcoBase

®

backing have reached a level where up to

97% of the materials are positively defined.

[3]

Desso has also developed a TakeBack™ programme to retrieve used carpets

(as long as they don't contain PVC) and recycle the materials.

Desso's goal is that by 2020 all its products will be designed according to Cradle

to Cradle principles and a large proportion of the energy consumed will be

renewable.

Stef Kranendijk will be talking about the company's sustainability strategy at the

Green Corporate Energy Conference in

London

on

June 27

th

where he will be

interviewed by the environmentalist and author John Elkington.

[4]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-----------------

Notes to editors:

Details on the award winners at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/gsb-awards-2012-winners-

announced

1. The report, Towards the Circular Economy: Economic and business rationale

for an accelerated transition was launched in

January 2012

by Dame Ellen

MacArthur, the founder of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation at the WEF summit

in

Davos

. Stef Kranendijk, CEO of Desso was one of the speakers at this launch

event. A full version of the report is available at:

http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/

2. Positively defined = all ingredients have been assessed as either Green

(optimal) or Yellow (tolerable) according to the Cradle to Cradle® assessment

criteria.

3. See footnote 2 above.

4. http://www.greencorporateenergy.com/2012/