Biofibre deserves the 1st prize, not least in view of the considerable environmental impact that the company achieves with its “BPB® ECO SPACER VP®”. Although it was only introduced on a test basis at the end of 2018, by March 2019 80 tons of the spreading granulate had already been delivered to concrete and floor slab manufacturers and orders had been booked for a further 160 tons. The realistic sales forecast for 2019 is 400 tons. If you assume that only a tenth of the LDPE granules replaced have ended up on roadsides and in ditches (there are no reliable figures), the product saves our environment 40 tons of microplastics per year. According to a recent study by the University of Basel, that is more than the Rhine washes into the sea in terms of tiny plastic particles!
The Biofibre company became aware of the problem of scattered granules through a chance encounter. Until then, the company had no connection to the construction industry, but made solving it her task. Even several years of research and considerable development costs could not dissuade the decision-makers from this goal. With a partner from the construction industry, a product was finally created that was almost 100 percent equal to the standard granulate that had been in use up to that point, but whose environmental impact turned positive. According to previous tests, the ECO SPACER are usually metabolized into compost by microorganisms in the soil within two years. From the point of view of many concrete slab manufacturers, this even justifies the higher price compared to standard products, as the sales figures impressively prove.
With the 1st prize, the jury would like to encourage innovators from the plastics industry to look for innovative solutions, especially in seemingly inconspicuous, little-noticed areas. This is where there is often particularly great potential for improvement, as the example of the ECO SPACER shows. So far, the construction industry has hardly been associated with biodegradable products. It is the largest plastic consumer and user ever!
