All the plastic we use is recycled waste. The small extra is colour and sun protection. Here's the simple breakdown, so you know exactly what you're buying.

Every Miell Green product starts as waste: bottles, packaging and industrial plastic that would otherwise end up in landfill or an incinerator. We sort it, clean it, melt it and press it into lumber that outlives timber many times over. And because we like being precise, here's exactly what's inside.

You can't stir loose colour powder into molten plastic any more than you can stir cocoa powder into cold milk. It clumps. So colour pigments and UV stabilisers come pre-mixed into little plastic pellets called a masterbatch. The plastic in those pellets, the "carrier resin", is what spreads the
pigment evenly through the material, and it needs to be extremely consistent to do its job, so it is often new plastic.

It's a small ingredient doing important work: the UV stabiliser in that package is what lets our coloured products shrug off 1,000 hours of simulated sunlight in lab testing without fading or weakening. And wherever a recycled masterbatch is available and technically possible, we use that instead, and we keep pushing our suppliers for more of it.

Three simple facts:

It recycles with ordinary methods. Our material is a straightforward polyolefin blend, so it can be reprocessed with generic plastic recycling: shred it, melt it, remould it. No special
chemistry, no exotic facility.

In our own system it's recyclable multiple times. Every heating cycle stresses a polymer a little. Our process skips the pelletising step most manufacturers use, so the plastic goes through
fewer heating cycles and keeps its quality through repeated lives. An old profile can come back through our take-back scheme and become a new profile, again and again.

One exception worth knowing. Our fire-retardant (FR) formulation is harder to recycle, precisely because of the extra heat resistance that makes it fire-safe. We'd rather mention that here
than in small print.

Fun fact for the curious: that small additive package is actually the largest single item in our carbon footprint, bigger than all our factory electricity. We break the whole footprint down line by line, with every emission factor and source shown, in our companion post.

See the full carbon breakdown >

Questions welcome

Want the exact composition specification for a tender or a project? Curious about anything on this page? Just ask:

adam.csomor@miellgreen.uk.