What goes around comes around at Listers

Going green, environmentally friendly, eco friendly and recycling are words that feature in our daily language with increasing regularity and nowadays, with even more importance. We all try to be as environmentally aware as possible and indeed we’re often frowned upon by the masses if we fail to make the necessary effort.

But Lister Trade Frames of Stoke on Trent have taken the challenge of surpassing the norm by working with a local company to create a recycling programme that they think could be an industry first.

Phil Warren, Sales Director for Listers explains: “We’ve been recycling old frames and other post consumer waste for a few years now with fantastic results and our environmental programme won us the G13 Environmental initiative last year. We wanted to see if we could go one step further and actually see a complete recycling loop take place under our guidance.”

And so a plan was born.

Listers struck up a relationship with a local recycler. After several conversations into how these two companies could work together, it was decided that Listers would send their waste plastic guttering to them for recycling. This was then ground down into pellets and reformed to make eaves protectors, a product that Listers sell on their Big Trade Counter. Listers bought the eaves protectors from them and immediately put them onto their counter for resale, thereby completing the recycling loop.

“We find it fascinating that what leaves our site as waste material comes back to us a fantastic new product that we can sell on, “commented Phil. ” We genuinely believe that this hasn’t been done before within our industry and certainly not within the locality of Stoke on Trent.”

Listers introduced their free to the customer recycling service roughly 5 years ago and in that time they have diverted several hundred tonnes of waste from landfill. This new initiative further endorses Listers attempts at being as green a business as possible.

“Reclaiming and reusing post-consumer plastics to manufacture new products allows Listers to reduce the environmental impact of its materials sourcing and manufacturing processes, which benefits everyone,” said Phil, “and we will continue to investigate further ways of helping the environment.”

It’s clearly apparent that Listers take their environmental responsibilities very seriously and with this latest project they are taking a stance on challenging the concept of run of the mill recycling. And it goes to show that what goes around…comes around.

It just looks different.