If you fabricate uPVC windows, your offcuts are a single-grade, traceable polymer stream. Kept separate and at the right volume, they're the cleanest input a profile recycler can buy. That's why the rebate is different from old frames, and why it matters how you handle them on the shop floor.
Post-industrial and post-consumer uPVC
Recyclers split rigid PVC-U waste into two categories, and the price reflects which one you're producing.
Post-consumer is anything that's been in service: frames from a replacement programme, conservatory frames from a strip-out, cills from a council retrofit. By the time it reaches us it's dirty, set in mortar, screwed to steel and sealed with butyl, sometimes painted, with the hardware still on. It's recyclable but needs the full line: deglaze on site, then shred, pull out the steel, granulate, clean and micronise. The regrind usually goes into the core of new profiles, or into fencing, garden products, conduit and trunking.
Post-industrial waste means your offcuts, redundant bar lengths and mis-measures, which have never been installed. They're the same virgin compound the profile manufacturer extruded last week, with no mortar, steel, hardware or UV damage, and the same spec the manufacturer buys as feedstock.
That's why fabricator offcuts are the most valuable uPVC waste stream in the trade.
What "closed-loop" means in profile manufacturing
"Closed-loop" gets used loosely. Strictly it means material from a product goes back into the same product, indefinitely. In window profile it's a bit more complicated.
Modern uPVC profile is co-extruded: a structural core and a capstock outer skin. The capstock is the visible surface, weather-resistant and UV-stable, often a different formulation to the core. Most system houses run it like this:
- The capstock layer is virgin compound with virgin titanium dioxide and fresh stabiliser. It's the bit you see, and it has to look right at year fifteen.
- The core layer can carry a set percentage of post-industrial regrind, and increasingly some cleaned post-consumer regrind, without affecting the strength of the finished profile.
With us, offcuts and redundant bar lengths are granulated, colour sorted and extruded into new products. The colour sorting happens after granulating, which is why all colours can go in the same cage.
White, foiled and coloured offcuts are all collected and recycled, and the colour makes no difference to the rate.
The Recovinyl scheme
The British Plastics Federation runs Recovinyl, the European industry programme for tracking PVC recycling. It's an industry traceability and reporting scheme that came out of VinylPlus, the European PVC industry's voluntary recycling commitment.
For fabricators, what matters is that material going through Recovinyl-registered processors counts towards verified industry tonnage, and the system houses (Rehau, Profine, Deceuninck, Veka, Eurocell, Liniar and the rest) increasingly want to know where their feedstock came from. A credible recycler will tell you where your material goes.
Cages, bins and containers
The right setup depends on your throughput, your floor plan and your shifts. The usual options are:
- Stillage cages. These are 1m³ to 2m³ steel mesh cages that sit next to the saw or trim station. You fill them and we swap full for empty. They suit smaller fabricators.
- IBC-style bulk bins. These work the same way but hold more, and suit high-volume lines.
- Containers. A 12 or 20 yard roll-on roll-off container sits on the yard and is filled over a set period. It suits high-volume sites with room for it.
- Redundant bar lengths. Full lengths of profile you no longer need, such as old stock or discontinued ranges. Tell us how many and how long when you book. More on bar lengths and mis-measures.
- Loose loads. For occasional clearances we send a vehicle and you load it. It's flexible, but the rebate is lower because nothing's sorted.
Most fabricators we work with run a mix: cages at the production cells and an outdoor container for QC rejects and clear-outs.
Frequency and shift pattern
If you run two shifts, you don't want a collection at 11am on a Tuesday when the floor is live and the forklift driver is needed elsewhere. Typical frequencies are:
- Weekly for medium fabricators (5,000–15,000 frames a year), with a cage swap that's in and out in half an hour.
- Twice-weekly for high-volume sites or those tight on storage.
- Container exchange when you call to say it's full, for larger operations.
We book slots around changeover, lunch or end of shift, when the forklift and the foreman are free.
Segregation and contamination
The biggest factor in your rebate is how clean the load is. A cage of offcuts with steel, gaskets or other waste mixed in drops to general regrind value. A cage of offcuts with nothing else in it is feedstock grade, whatever the colour.
What contaminates a load:
- Steel reinforcement left inside the offcut, which costs us a separation step.
- Gaskets, brush pile and weather seals. They're a different polymer and downgrade the regrind.
- Glazing tape, butyl and silicone. These are sticky and survive granulation.
- Non-uPVC plastics: polypropylene packaging, ABS hardware blanks, anything that's drifted in from the pack-out cell.
- Sweepings. Floor debris with concrete dust, swarf and cigarette ends. One cage of clean offcuts is worth more than two cages of "general factory waste".
Whether material goes to a granulator or a shredder matters. A shredder tears material apart, which is fine for mixed loads. A granulator cuts cleanly to a set screen size and gives a uniform regrind that goes straight to a compounder. Clean offcuts go to the granulator and contaminated material goes to the shredder, and there's a big difference in what each is worth.
What affects the rebate
We don't put rebate figures in a blog post because they change with the polymer market. These are the things that affect them:
- Volume. A steady monthly tonnage gets a better rate than ad-hoc loads, because we can plan the vehicle and the onward delivery.
- Material. Offcuts earn the most. Redundant bar lengths and mis-measures also earn a rebate.
- Segregation. Offcuts kept apart from frames and other waste are worth more than mixed loads.
- Cleanliness. No steel, gaskets or foreign bodies in the load.
- Traceability. Material with a known history (system house, profile range, batch if you have it) is worth more.
- Format. Manageable lengths, ideally offcuts under 1m, in stillages or bulk bags.
The rebate is what the reprocessor pays us, less collection cost, so cleaner loads get a better rate. Loads are weighed on a weighbridge or priced per van load, and we pay the rebate within 24 hours.
What the transfer note does for you
Every collection comes with an electronic waste transfer note (eWTN) within 24 hours, meeting Section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. It discharges your duty of care for that load, gives you the audit trail ISO 14001 and supply-chain reporting want, and lets us add up your annual tonnage into a report you can hand to the system house or a main contractor. We're an Environment Agency Upper-Tier waste carrier, which is the minimum anyone moving your offcuts off site must have.
Skip hire and scrap dealers
Fabricators sometimes default to the local skip company because it's the easiest call, and a licensed skip firm can legally carry uPVC. The problem is the material almost certainly ends up at a mixed waste transfer station, goes into general waste, and heads for energy-from-waste, refuse-derived fuel or, at worst, landfill.
Sending feedstock out as general waste:
- Costs you the rebate you should have received.
- Costs you the recycling tonnage you should have reported.
- Removes your material from the closed loop entirely.
- Puts you on the wrong side of supplier audits. System houses are starting to ask fabricators where their offcuts go, and "in the skip" is an awkward answer.
The same goes for scrap dealers. Most metals yards have no granulation line for rigid PVC-U, so they bulk the material up without processing it.
The DEFRA waste hierarchy puts recycling above recovery (energy-from-waste) and recovery above disposal, so a fabricator filling skips is in the middle at best.
Setting up offcut collection
If you're not on an offcut collection programme yet, moving over is straightforward.
- Site visit. We walk the floor and look at your saw cells, storage, loading bay access and shift pattern.
- Container plan. Cages at the saws, a container for bulk, and a vehicle that fits your gates.
- Schedule. Collection slots that fit your shift changes.
- Paperwork. A service agreement, eWTNs set up, and whoever handles your environmental reporting copied in.
- Rebate review. We weigh and grade the first three months of loads, then agree a rate that reflects what's coming through.
The first month is always a bit of a calibration. By month three the rate is settled and your offcuts are earning you money instead of costing you skip charges. Our UK uPVC disposal cost guide sets out what the skip route costs once you add compliance and the lost rebate. For where your material ends up, see what happens to old uPVC windows and why uPVC shouldn't go to landfill.
Where we collect from
We run from Chester, Wigan, Haslingden, Stoke-on-Trent and Rotherham, covering the North West, Liverpool, Wales, the Midlands and Yorkshire. Most UK fabricators are within an hour of one of those, which means same or next day and a vehicle that isn't running half empty. See locations for your nearest hub, or what we collect on the homepage.
Send photos of your setup (saw cell, cage, container, loading bay) and we'll come back with a collection plan and a rough rebate band the same working day. Call 0330 043 5543 or email info@upvcrecycling.com.
We work from five hubs: Chester, Wigan, Haslingden, Stoke-on-Trent and Rotherham. See uPVC window frame recycling for what we take, or call 0330 043 5543.