Better Future Factory heeft dit gerepost
COO | Turbocharging Sustainable Product Innovation | Helping companies make their consumer goods future-proof | Founder of Better Future Factory & Upstream Trophies
The innovation behind a plastic tile. Why it is awesome, and why it did not make it to the market. 👇 One of the projects I am most proud of is New Marble. We developed a tile made from fully recycled PET plastic. We found out in our initial experiments that PET crystallizes when cooling down after melting. It becomes hard and brittle, something you tipycally want to avoid when processing it. But we looked at it from the other side It is just like ceramics: hard and brittle. Can we make it into a product that could replace ceramics? Lots of experiments later we managed to developed a patented technique to control the crystallization and turn PET in it into a tile: straight, solid and beautiful. Our next goal was to make it work as a tile and get it certified. With a new product in a very traditional market we needed to make it work with existing application techniques. We therefor developed and tested the glue and grout process together with Kiesel. As there was no standard certification for plastic tiles we had to come up with a tailored testing & certification program. Flammability for example is not really a thing for ceramics but for plastic it is. In the end we managed to have the tiles certified by KIWA and get a Castor Gaea classification for sustainable products. We were thrilled to have the first fully certified tiles made from 100% recycled plastic. The tiles were applied in the some iconic projects. New Marble tiles were used for the first Circulair Bathroom of The Netherlands and the Recycled Park in Rotterdam, a park floating in the river Maas, with tiles made from PET plastic from the river Maas. So why did we have to discontinue it? A combination of market and technical challenges. The product was very niche. The market demanded bigger and bigger tiles while we could not produce the tiles over 20x20cm. And as we did not want to use bottle grade recycled PET, we were very limited in colors and these types of PET were harder to process. There were technical challenges as well. Next to challenges in scaling the process, the thermal expansion coefficient of plastic tiles is bigger than ceramics. In other words the tiles get bigger when they become warmer, resulting in tiles popping off the wall outside on hot summer days. This seriously limited the application possibilities. The decision to start is easy, the decision to stop is hard. I am very proud of everyone that has contributed to this project.
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