Sustainability is a partnership in action between board, doors and furniture fittings manufacturer and supplier, Hill’s Panel Products (HPP), and chipboard maker, Egger.
The two businesses are working in tandem to ensure that their respective plants and products the greenest they can be, with their efforts documented in the latest HPP catalogue for its trade customers.
Oldham-based HPP makes and supplies an expansive range of full and processed sheet material, vinyl wrapped furniture doors and fittings, while Egger is one of its major suppliers of melamine faced chipboard products – all made from wood from PEFC and FSC accredited forests.
“Chipboard from Egger is a carbon positive material, it stores more carbon than it releases,” says HPP’s business development and marketing director, Dan Mounsey.
“Chipboard has a 10 to 20-year lifecycle and then you can recycle it again afterwards. We are both keen to get that message through to our customers and their consumers, and we are doing everything we can to support it.”
Egger, which has been supplying HPP throughout the majority of its 30-year history, has created a dedicated area on its website showing how its teams sustainably source the materials used to make its wood-based products.
Its founder, Fritz Egger Senior, is famous in the timber-based product industry for his comment: “Wood is far too valuable to just throw away”.
Dan Mounsey adds: “We are taking account of sustainability with everything we do; from our vehicles, to our processes and packaging, to day-to-day operations.
“Our operations are certified as zero landfill which means that less than 1% of waste from our plant went into landfill last year. We recycle as much as we can; we burn our offcuts; we have our own boilers that heat various buildings, and we have multiple solar panel installations.
“We have moved from polystyrene corner protectors on our doors and worktops to pulp-based protectors and all of our deliveries are now paperless. We are already doing a lot, but are also conscious that moving forward we can and need to do more.”
HPP has also just added the first all-electric car to its sales fleet with more to follow and is investing in eight new HGVs that meet clean air zone regulations.
Egger UK, meanwhile, is amongst the largest users of recycled wood in the industry, with 40 per cent of one of its chipboard panels being made using recycled wood. Its other sustainability credentials include:
Over €500m invested in its 20 plants worldwide to make its technology the most efficient available.
Sustainable water systems that cleanse surface water from its plants before it is released into local rivers.
Egger is also raising awareness of its four recycling plants operated by subsidiary company, Timberpak. It saved 71,000 tonnes of CO2 in 2020-21 by burning unusable wood residue to create heat rather than using natural gas.
