Key Highlights:
- Benvic Group's CEO, Luc Mertens, announced a new company mission and a new corporate identity: “Redesigning Plastics. For Good.”
- The new identity aims to underscore its commitment to the circular economy, broaden capabilities in PVC compounds and develop new thermoplastic compounds for existing and upcoming customers.
- The whole sustainable strategy is underpinned by Benvic’s 2024-6 action plan for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), building upon Benvic’s existing ESG activities and achievements for the past four years.
Benvic
As the summer gets underway, Europe’s independent polymer compounder Benvic, is thriving. In a recent message to all company stakeholders, Luc Mertens, Benvic Group CEO, announced a new company mission and a new corporate identity: ‘Our Benvic future begins with the rollout of our new corporate identity. What will such a future look like? We express it simply as “Redesigning Plastics. For Good.”'
Founded in 1963, Benvic is a global supplier of thermoplastic compounds. From concept to fulfilment, Benvic develops, manufactures and markets innovative and highly customised customer solutions that are used in a wide range of applications and markets. In late 2022, such innovation led the Benvic Group to be acquired by the International Chemical Investors Group (ICIG).
Luc Mertens noted that “our full integration within ICIG will be expressed in our new corporate identity.” This will:
- Underscore our commitment to the upcoming circular economy.
- Broaden our capabilities in PVC compounds.
- Develop new thermoplastic compounds as solutions for existing and upcoming customers.
“Benvic's core values and service will not change: We will retain and develop our commercial strengths - in particular, bespoke customer care and service. Our existing product portfolio will be sustained, especially for PVC compounds where we continue to lead the market in all major aspects,” Mertens added.
Today, Benvic operates as part of a larger ICIG grouping that covers a total of twenty-eight businesses, served by 6800 employees worldwide. Benvic currently runs a total of eight production sites in France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the UK and the USA and is fully committed to tailor-made polymer solutions and advancing the circular economy with recycled and biobased content.
The latter activity is key for Benvic. “Our circular economy mission has released ICIG investment that will double our overall production capacity in PVC recycling, together with a significant expansion of our EREPLAST SAS subsidiary. In addition, this company will be renamed BENVIC RECYCLING SAS - strongly underscoring the importance of this technology for all our Benvic Group companies,” Mertens claimed.
“The ICIG synergies that are now available to us will also enable Benvic to deliver greater creativity, flexibility, and sustainability to the most important entity in our world – our customers.”
Doubling down on recycled content
Sustainable production solutions are indeed moving quickly ahead for everyone in today's polymer industry: Legal regulations, corporate carbon neutrality targets, and customer choices are triggering the market to quickly adopt manufacturing methods that save non-renewable resources.
As a polymer compounder, Benvic is fully committed to the business of mechanical recycling. The company’s value-added skills and resources mean the supply of stable performance and availability from heterogeneous and non-recurrent feedstocks.
Bio-based solutions
In some cases, however, the material limitations are significant enough to prevent the use of recyclate. What then? This situation then provides the opportunity for the use of bio-based resins, such as Benvic’s Plantura range of compounds– tried and successfully tested for the most demanding of engineering applications.
April’s IOM3 PVC 2024 event in Edinburgh, Scotland also saw the launch of Benvic’s ProVinyl Infinite range of materials. Specifically developed and tested in Benvic laboratories, Provinyl Infinite compounds now provide bio-based solutions for PVC-related uses and applications.
The immediate advantage of ProVinyl Infinite is that it offers a significant carbon balance drop to users without any major material change or re-qualification.
Thanks to proper certification reporting from Benvic's supply chain, the switch to bio-based resins can give Benvic customers a ready environmental solution at minimum cost, inclusive of the same performance, reliability, and certification - and without the need for additional testing or protocols. This is particularly attractive to the windows, doors and pressure fitting markets for example.
And since the cost of ProVinyl Infinite compounds is significantly higher than conventional PVC compounds, their use is targeted at specific applications and towards multi-shot mouldings and layered extrusions. For example, ProVinyl Infinite grades can be used:
- As an exposed surface or skin in order to overcome the aesthetics of recycled materials issues (which can then be used as a core material). In this way, both bio-based and recycled solutions can be used in the same application to maximise the environmental impact.
- Where the extra cost can be compensated by the final benefits and the value-added improvement, particularly in consumer products where environmental concerns are a key differentiator and income generator.
- In all these cases. Benvic materials engineering is needed to design the solution - based on eco-design considerations and Benvic’s future support and development of these materials.
Provinyl Infinite compounds can directly replace corresponding petro-sourced grades or can also be used in conjunction with other fillers.
Benvic’s ‘mix and match’ commitment to both recyclate and biopolymers technologies means that the company is fast becoming the ‘go-to’ materials supplier for the emerging circular economy.
Engineering a sustainable strategy
The whole sustainable strategy is also underpinned by Benvic’s 2024-6 action plan for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG). The new plan builds upon Benvic’s existing ESG activities and achievements for the past four years.
Environmental success breeds further success. Last year – for the second year running - Benvic was awarded Gold-Level excellence by the international provider of sustainability ratings – Ecovadis.
This ranking continues to place the company among the top 2% in the industry for sustainable achievement and is key to the company's mission to partner with like-minded suppliers and customers and to manufacture for the emerging and growing circular economy.