Investing in a circular future
The power of repoliol
After eight years of R&D, Ikano Industry in Poland is first in the world to demonstrate that it is possible to recycle foam from post-consumer mattresses to create repoliol, a raw material suitable for the production of new foam products.
To capture this enormous potential, Ikano Industry has together with Ingka Investments and Renewi, invested in Dutch mattress dismantler RetourMatras. The company is set to dismantle more than 1.5 million foam mattresses per year in the Netherlands and Belgium. This development is a key step for Ikano Industry to become the world’s first completely climate neutral foam producer by 2025.
Essentially this means that for each new mattress
we put on the market, we will collect and recycle another.
In Europe alone, 30 million mattresses are dumped each year and 18 million of them are disposed of in landfills. Since 2013, Ikano Industry’s R&D department has finetuned their ground-breaking technology to chemically recycle foam. The result is repoliol, a raw material suitable for production of new foam products like sofas and mattresses, keeping the post-consumer foam out of landfills.
What started out as a solution to recycling Ikano Industry’s own foam waste has now been developed into a scalable technology, allowing us to take in external foam waste from other suppliers and recycling it. With this investment, we are definitely taking the next step in our journey to become fully circular in our production.
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