Imaginative end product concepts for using waste PVC advertising banners have been displayed at Waste Expo Australia, a business-to-business exhibition for waste, recycling and sustainability in Australia.

Roof shingles, pallet slip sheets, floor tiles and a design for a water storage/seat for garden drip irrigation were among the inspirational ideas presented by Monash University at the event, held from 11 to 12 October 2017 in Melbourne.

The designs were created after the Vinyl Council successfully obtained funding from the NSW Environment Trust to identify ways to reprocess advertising billboard skins and find potential end markets for the recyclate.

Currently around 500 tonnes of this material are disposed to landfill each year, as well as larger quantities of grain covers and truck tarpaulins totalling around 5,000 tonnes per year.

Commenting on the designs, Vinyl Council Chief Executive Sophi MacMillan said: “A series of workshops and forums with the Outdoor Media industry, Monash University, UNSW and manufacturers have delivered excellent results.

“As well as producing some fabulous ideas for recycled PVC, the concepts reflect perfectly the Waste Expo principles of ‘Where today’s waste becomes tomorrow’s future’.”

Other ideas for using the reprocessed material include a woven fabric for should bags, skateboard skins and sound attenuation barriers.

Finding solutions to reprocessing the waste PVC involved close collaboration between industry associations, manufacturers, industrial designers and chemical engineers.

“As a priority recycling area, we are very encouraged by these early results,” added Sophi. “A new reprocessing method has been identified, which is proceeding to international patent, and a low-cost reprocessing method has been identified for some suitable product, leading to 2 tonnes recycled material per month.”

Chemson Pacific Pty Ltd, a Vinyl Council of Australia member, demonstrated a world-first for 3DVinyl™ material by 3D-printing a giant flower vase using a pellet-fed 3D-printer designed by Titan Robotics USA.

Titan Robotics had joined Chemson representatives at Rapid 3D, a 3D-printing exhibition in Pittsburgh, USA where it took three hours to print the 14kg vase. It’s a first for 3DVinyl™ in that all 3D-printing work conducted so far with vinyl, or PVC, has so far been with filament-fed machines.

Since unveiling their technological breakthrough in May 2016, Chemson Group, worldwide leaders in the PVC stabilizer additives industry, has been working on changes to the material’s thermoplastic PVC formulation. These include improvements to the Z-axis interlayer adhesion, impact resistance and thermal stability.

Speaking after the May 2017 exhibition,  Greg Harrison, Specialist for Chemson on Additive Manufacturing materials and 3DVinyl™ co-inventor comments: “We have some more formulation adjustments to do, which will shortly be completed, but overall we have demonstrated that 3DVinyl™ PVC has a place in the industrial Advanced Manufacturing world of 3D-printable polymers.”

A short video of the vase during the 3D-printing process can be seen here.

Dr J.-Dieter Klamann, MD of Chemson Pacific Pty Ltd and 3DVinyl™ co-inventor adds: “Everybody is working on the printing speed factor…but - if you look closely at the complexity of the shapes, the biggest breakthrough is that they cannot be made by any other process!”

Excited by their success, Dieter and his fellow co-inventors, Greg and Dennis Planner, 3DVinyl™ Product Manager say it ‘shows a clear way forward for the industry’.

“After this initial success of having a printable version of PVC in the form of 3DVinyl™, the international Chemson team is currently undertaking concerted efforts to adapt PVC’s well-established unique potential and versatility for applications in the 3D Printing/AM world,” says Dieter. “These new PVC products will be introduced step-by-step into the 3DP community after basic 3D printability is assessed in our rigorous pre-tests.”

Welcoming enquiries from interested parties, Dennis adds: “We hope to engage and collaborate with industry to help us further improve the current formulation within the context of industrial and product manufacturing use cases that can’t be effectively emulated in our lab and previous field testing environments.”

Chemson plans to offer 3DVinyl™ in both filament and pellet form to cover a wider array of 3D printers and applications.

The Vinyl Council is delighted to welcome a recently new member.

• Dincel Pty Ltd has joined the Council as an Ordinary member and as a Signatory to the PSP. Based in NSW, Dincel manufactures the Dincel Construction System, a PVC permanent formwork profile for constructing concrete walls and columns. The Sydney plant has four extrusion lines and continues to grow the market for this PVC application. 
• IXOM Operations Pty Ltd has joined the Council as an Ordinary member. Based in VIC. They are a chemicals distributor in Australia and New Zealand and supply plasticisers to the PVC industry.

The Vinyl Council truly represents the vinyl value chain in Australia, acting as the collective voice for the industry and working to enhance the industry's opportunities for growth and sustainable development.

See a full list of Council members here.

To inquire about membership, call 03 9510 1711 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

At the Vinyl Council, we believe it is how a material is managed and used throughout its life cycle which determines its contribution to a more sustainable society and economy. To guide and support companies in the PVC value chain in Australia, industry and stakeholders developed the PVC Stewardship Program as an on-going, long-term, voluntary undertaking by the industry to address progressively environmental, health and safety issues along the PVC product life cycle within responsible and deliverable timeframes.

The 2016 annual report of progress achieved by industry through implementation of the PVC Stewardship Program has just been released, following independent verification by Ernst & Young. Now in its fifteenth year, a record 42 Signatory companies provided their 2016 data and information to the Vinyl Council, with almost one third of them first time reporters this year. The latest report finds that almost three-quarters (73%) of the Signatories achieved compliance rates of 80 percent or more.

Nine Signatories were fully compliant with all the commitments relevant to their business, earning them the Vinyl Council’s Excellence in PVC Stewardship Award.

The 2016 annual report saw improvements in compliance for three key areas of the Program:

• avoiding mercury in upstream raw material manufacture;
• commitment to energy efficiency and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; and
• implementation of environmental management systems.

Compliance with the commitment to source raw materials from supply chains that do not use mercury cell electrolysis technology, or mercury catalysts rose from 64 percent in 2015 to 82 percent in 2016. Furthermore, only one Signatory was unable to access this information from their suppliers, demonstrating the growing acceptance of greater transparency in supply chains.

In early 2016, the Australian vinyl industry saw the closure of the country’s last remaining local resin manufacturing plant. Product manufacturers now source resins from overseas suppliers, increasing the complexity and globalisation of supply chains and making transparency and responsible sourcing even more important.

The PVC Stewardship Program facilitates presenting the evidence of the traceability of PVC throughout the product life cycle. As part of the report verification process, nine audits were conducted at Signatory company sites to help assess the veracity of the data being used in the report.

In only the second year of implementing a new commitment to improve packaging material recycling, 24 Signatories reported against the commitment, up from 14 in 2015. A growing number of Signatories report that more than 70 percent of incoming packaging waste at their business site is being recycled; they record or measure how different waste streams are managed at their site/s; and they undertake initiatives such as packaging design improvements, packaging material labelling, packaging light-weighting and offering packaging take-back programs.

The annual report identified some areas for further improvement:

• Embedding PVC Stewardship commitments into business policies and procedures so that it is part of core business;
• Using recoPVC (recycled PVC) in products supplied to the market – although 6,292,609 kilograms of recoPVC was reported as contained in products Signatories supplied to the market in 2016, two out of five product suppliers are not yet supplying products containing recyclate;
• Completing the phase out of lead-containing additives - over 99.45 percent of use of these additives has been phased out by Signatories since 2002, however two Signatories are working to find technically feasible alternatives to some minor uses of them for specific applications, within the timelines they had set upon joining the Program.

According to the Vinyl Council's PVC Stewardship Manager Ms Laveen Dhillon, the requirements to be met under the Program are challenging. "Each year Signatory companies must verify that they or their upstream suppliers meet stringent manufacturing standards set by the Program for raw material sourcing, as well as meet local manufacturing commitments such as in use of additives, or implement energy and resource efficiency".

Audit findings showed that Signatories are undertaking internal quality checks and procedures to improve the accuracy and reliability of reporting. Ms Dhillon will continue to work closely with Signatories in 2017 to strengthen engagements across the PVC supply chain, improve program reporting requirements and promote resources available to reach compliance.

Download the 2016 full report here.

Note: The PVC Stewardship Program, managed by the Vinyl Council, is a series of commitments which Signatories are required to implement and report on annually to drive continual improvement in the vinyl value chain in Australia and reduce the environmental footprint of PVC products consumed here. Given the varied nature of Signatory businesses, the list of commitments applicable to each company varies depending on its activity and position in the supply chain.