Accsys advances its sustainability strategy with pilot programme to reclaim offcuts of FSC® certified Accoya® wood to create FSC Recycled® material for Tricoya® wood chips.
With Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Gold status, our Accoya wood is a building material with leading circular economy credentials – but what happens to the offcuts when it is manufactured into different shapes, styles and end products by our customers? While it can be treated at the end of its life just like other woods, Accsys has started a more direct and value-enhancing reuse and upcycling programme: reclaiming the offcuts to process into Tricoya® wood chips.
As detailed in our recently-published Sustainability Report, we are committed to maximising the environmental benefits our products provide to the world. Our premium solid wood product, Accoya, starts as FSC® wood sourced from sustainable, well-managed forests. We enhance the wood’s natural properties to create a non-toxic, highly stable and very durable product, storing carbon safely in a useful product for decades.
With certified FSC® Recycled status, we have started a programme to take back Accoya wood trimmings from some of our trusted manufacturing partners, reprocessing it into Tricoya chips that are then used to make Tricoya panels. The Accoya offcuts are already acetylated, making it a highly efficient process to create Tricoya chips directly from them – and minimising waste. There can be no compromise on quality though, and much effort and care is taken to ensure the purity of the supply of offcuts with inspection before reuse. This means carefully managing the programme, its deployment and potential expansion in future.
Tricoya MDF panels share many of Accoya’s benefits: durable, stable and suitable for use even in wet environments, they retain the ease of use of traditional wood panels but can be used instead of many less sustainable materials such as aluminium, plastic or concrete – even outdoors in the rain, or in wet or humid indoor settings. This enables and encourages new levels of creativity and sustainability for our built environments. Although our offcut reclamation and reuse programme is still in its early stages, our goal is to develop it further over time and open it up to more and more of our customers – and potentially their customers too. This not only keeps the carbon locked into our materials for longer, but also enhances value, reduces waste, and further embeds our sustainable and circular economy philosophy.