Gracious Living is the largest outdoor patio furniture brand in Canada. It’s finding both marketing and manufacturing success using increasing amounts of recycled plastic in its’ products. Gracious Living products are popular with environmentally focused customers who want sustainably focused products. The company has introduced advanced plastics recycling technology such as EREMA COREMA systems to turn plastic scrap and waste into high-quality plastic pellets that are used to make its' products.

In addition to its' growing sustainable consumer products business, Gracious Living is also a plastics injection molding contract manufacturer with 65 injection molding machines that range from 100 tons to 3,000 tons, across 43 extrusion lines. With extensive recycling and compounding capabilities. “This allows us to meet our customer’s challenging requirements and maintain our efficiencies and ultimately, our profitability” says Carlo Nudi, Vice President of business development.

The company has reached its’ long-held goal of achieving 100% recovery of all plastic waste with an expanding line of products made from recycled plastic. “We extend our recycling and compounding services to help our contract customers through collection and recycling programs we manage”, Nudi says. With costs rising in Ontario, where its’ main manufacturing facilities are located, it’s important to note that “manufacturing new plastic products from recycled plastic materials can generate energy savings of up to 60 percent” and the larger impact is that every ton of recycled plastic saves as much as 2,000 gallons of gasoline.

Gracious Living Facility Where Products are Made from Recycled Plastic

An Example of a Gracious Living Product Made from Recycled Plastic

Part of the Process of Making Products from Recycled Plastic - Recycling Flexible Packaging

Recycling Raw Material Such as a Wide Range of PolyPropylene Regrind - for Making Products from Recycled Plastic

The EREMA COREMA system allows for a flexible input products profile thanks to its’ preconditioning unit with Counter Current technology. It delivers minimum thermal stress through short, well-defined dwell times and direct dosing of the melt in the twin screw compounder / extruder. It provides degassing at the extruder and the addition of the laser filter allows processing of more contaminated feedstocks.

EREMA COREMA Plastics Recycling System

You can learn more about EREMAs customer Gracious Living and their capacity to make new products from recycled plastic in the recent article in Manufacturing Focus, Making Recycled Plastic Work.