How is recycling and downcycling working in practice?

On 28 th of may our Erasmus  group visited Mech-Rol-Plast which is located in Koźmin WIelkopolski. This company is producing the skirting board, underlay panels and termopian.

The company is using CO2 to avoid CFC, which is more harmful than CO2. There are five companies in Poland which produce underlay floor panels, but only two of them use CO2. Every customer has his own colour.

The material that is produced by the company is called Termopian and may be more expensive than styrofoam, which can be used for floor underlay too, but the Termopian is better at soundproofing and isolating. This, in turn leads to the houses being warmer and people having to use less fuel to warm their houses.

They use recycled plastic waste in the form of plastic granulate to produce new products. The plastic waste is pressed into plastic granulate which is then melted and made into a new form. The melted plastic is cooled down with the help of CO2.
To be more ecofriendly, the try to replace the old method called “hot stamping”, which produces waste. They are digital printing instead. They use CO2 to cool down the plastic. Now they are trying to replace it with water containers.

Written by

Angelica Viola

Bartosz Cieślak

Tomasz Rogowski

Evelyn Hoffman

Aleksandra Król

Dawid Kaj

Krzysztof Buniowski