Project description
Sustainably recycled kitchen countertops
The circular economy relies on the reduction, reuse or recycling of raw materials to create new products. SUSTONABLE is a sterling example of a composite building material minimising waste and making the most of resources. Developed and patented by INNSTECH, SUSTONABLE is a strong stone composite material made from recycled PET bottles and quartz, without the use of harmful chemicals. The material is 100 % recyclable, light, flexible, retaining the looks and feel of a natural stone. It has high impact resistance and flexural strength and can be produced in the form of very thin end products. The company will primarily target use of this sustainable composite stone in kitchen countertops.
Objective
SUSTONABLE is a revolutionary thin and ultra-lightweight building material developed and patented by INNSTECH, with the physical look and feel of engineered (quartz) stone. The product has a high scratch and impact resistance. The end product weighs 1/3 of current engineered stone while using only 20% of the raw materials.
In recent 30 years composite stone has been replacing natural stone in the kitchen. Artificial stone is a factory-made alternative with all the beauty of the natural material and the added benefits of resistance to staining, consistent colour, ease of handling and cutting. It is a fast-growing segment with 400M m2 countertops sold and will continue to gain share from less desirable materials such as HP Laminate worktops, which still represent 50% of the market as the cheapest option.
We at INNSTECH have pioneered the way to use recycled PET from plastic bottles and create a thin composite stone-like material that is recyclable with a very efficient process, and still having the desired look, feel and properties of current composite stone. Moreover, we can drastically reduce SUSTONABLE price than comparable materials in the market -up to 50% cheaper than top vendor engineered stone, e.g. Silestone with sales €548M/yr.
Our vision is to deliver the next generation stone surface materials ready for the new sustainable circular economy, while positioning SUSTONABLE in the low-cost segment of the market offering the high-quality functional properties of competitors.
Having already successfully run our process in a pilot plant, SUSTONABLE has produced approximately 450 slabs of 250x80cm. The business strategy is first to prove the technology in the kitchen market by building and operating a medium scale plant with a capacity of 400,000 m2/year, reaching €12.6 million revenues in 2024.
The kitchen countertop leader in NL, Dekker (3500 countertops per week), has signed up as a co-investor in the project with the intention to sell and install SUSTONAB
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringmanufacturing engineering
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwaste managementwaste treatment processesrecycling
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringcolors
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicssustainable economy
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Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020
See other projects for this callSub call
H2020-SMEInst-2018-2020-1
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
2408 AM ALPHEN AAN DEN RIJN
Netherlands
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.