What happens to old uPVC windows?

From skip to pellet: what actually happens to a uPVC window after we collect it — and why landfill stopped being the answer years ago.

The short version

An old uPVC window is not waste. It's a sandwich of materials — rigid PVC profile, sealed-unit glass, EPDM or silicone gaskets, steel reinforcement, and brass or zinc-alloy hardware — every layer of which has a downstream buyer if you separate it properly.

Our job is the separation. Yours is getting the frames off site without paying landfill prices to bury something a profile extruder will pay to buy back.

Here's the route a frame takes from the moment it leaves your van.

Step one — collection and arrival at the hub

A frame's recycling life starts the moment it goes into the right container. We work from five operating hubs — Chester, Wigan, Haslingden, Stoke-on-Trent and Rotherham — so most loads in the North West, Midlands and Yorkshire are routed back to a yard within an hour or two of pickup.

On arrival the load is weighed in, logged against the eWTN, and tipped into a holding bay segregated by source. Glazed frames, deglazed frames, doors, conservatory roof bars, fascias and clean fabricator offcuts each take a slightly different path through the line. Mixed loads are sorted manually before they go any further — colour-mixed white-and-foil frames, for example, are kept apart from clean white-only stock because the resulting pellet has a different end market.

This sounds bureaucratic but it's not. It's the difference between a load that earns a rebate and a load that has to be downgraded to a lower-grade product stream.

Step two — deglazing

If the frame still has glass in it, the sealed unit comes out first. On the line, that's a controlled break-out — the IGU is cut from the frame, the gaskets are pulled, and the glass is routed to our standalone glass recycling stream. Hardware (handles, hinges, locking gear, friction stays) is removed at the same station and goes into a metals bay for downstream non-ferrous and ferrous reprocessing.

For installers and fabricators reading this: you do not need to deglaze before collection. We accept glazed frames as standard. If you have the kit and the time to deglaze on site, it loads tighter and may improve the rate. If you don't, leave them as-is — we built the line around mixed-condition input, because that's what real site waste actually looks like.

For deeper detail on the sealed-unit side specifically, we've written that up separately in sealed unit recycling.

Step three — shredding and granulation

Deglazed frames go through a primary shredder. This is the loud bit. Industrial shears reduce a full casement frame to coarse chunks in seconds, including the steel reinforcement bar that runs through most outerframes and sashes.

Coarse output then goes into a secondary granulator, which steps the particle size down again to roughly fingernail-sized flakes. At this point you have a mixed stream of PVC granulate, ferrous metal, residual gasket rubber, fragments of glass that escaped deglazing, and the occasional chunk of trapped silicone or sealant.

Nothing is recyclable yet. It all looks the same — small, grey, dusty. The value comes out at the next stage.

Step four — separation

Multi-stage separation is where a uPVC line earns its keep. The shredded stream passes through, in roughly this order:

• Magnetic separation — overband magnets pull the steel reinforcement out of the flow. That ferrous metal goes to a UK steel reprocessor.
• Eddy-current separation — for the non-ferrous metals (handle bodies, gearing) that the magnet didn't catch.
• Density and air separation — air classifiers and float-sink tanks split the lighter rubber and gasket fragments away from the heavier rigid PVC. Glass fines settle out in the same step.
• Optical sorting — for high-grade lines, cameras and near-infrared sensors identify and reject any non-PVC plastic that's slipped through (polycarbonate from conservatory panels, ABS from trim, the odd bit of acrylic).

What comes out the back of separation is clean PVC granulate — sometimes already split by colour. White is the volume product. Foil-effect, woodgrain and coloured stock are processed in their own batches because, in the pellet market, colour mixing kills value.

Step five — pelletising

Clean PVC granulate is then washed, dried, and fed into an extruder. The extruder melts the granulate, filters it through a fine screen pack, and pushes it through a die where it's cut into uniform pellets — typically a few millimetres across, the same shape and size as the virgin pellets a profile extruder would buy from a polymer supplier.

That pellet is the end of the recycling line and the start of the next product. From here it's no longer "waste". It's a feedstock.

By the time a pellet leaves the bagging station, the only thing distinguishing it from virgin PVC is its price and its carbon number.

Step six — who actually buys the pellets

Recycled PVC has a real, established market in the UK and across Europe. Most of it is sold into one of four product streams.

New window profiles

This is the headline answer to "where do old windows go?" — back into new windows. UK and European profile manufacturers extrude new uPVC profile with a recycled-content core sandwiched between virgin-PVC outer skins. The structural performance is identical to all-virgin profile; the carbon footprint is meaningfully lower; and the pellet feeding the core can have come from a frame that was first installed thirty years ago. That's what closed-loop means in practice. We've covered this end of the chain in more detail in closed-loop window recycling.

Garden, fencing and outdoor products

Recycled PVC pellet is widely used for fence posts, fence panels, decking boards, pipe lagging, garden edging and cable trunking. These applications don't need cosmetic-grade colour control, which makes them the natural home for mixed-colour reclaim and lower-grade output.

Construction products

Soffits, fascia board, drainage, ducting, conduit, flooring underlay — all standard uses for recycled-content PVC. Construction is a high-volume buyer because the products are buried, painted, or covered, and the recycled origin doesn't matter to the spec.

Sheet and trim

Foamed PVC sheet, signage substrate, and various trim profiles are routinely produced from reclaim. If you've ever bought a bit of foam PVC at a builders' merchant and wondered where it came from, there's a good chance the answer is: a window frame.

What about the steel, glass and gaskets?

Nothing on a window is wasted if you've separated properly.

• Steel reinforcement — sent to UK steel reprocessors for re-melt. Steel is one of the most recycled materials on earth and the PVC industry's reinforcement bar slots straight into that supply chain.
• Sealed-unit glass — clean float glass goes back into UK cullet for new flat glass or container glass. Contaminated or coated glass goes into glass fibre, mineral wool, abrasive media or aggregate.
• Hardware — non-ferrous metals to dedicated reprocessors. Brass and zinc-alloy handles, locking gear and hinge bodies all have established scrap markets.
• Gaskets and rubber — EPDM and silicone are downgraded into rubber crumb for surfacing, matting and infill.

Why landfill stopped being the answer

The Waste Hierarchy is not optional. Under the Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011, anyone producing or handling waste has a legal duty to apply the hierarchy — prevent first, then re-use, recycle, recover, and only dispose as the last resort. Burying a uPVC frame in a landfill cell when there's a profile extruder ready to buy the pellet is the bottom rung of that ladder. It's also the most expensive rung, once you factor in landfill tax.

uPVC is not biodegradable in any meaningful timescale. A frame put into landfill in 1995 is, to a first approximation, still a frame. Recycling routes for rigid PVC have existed at industrial scale for years now — through programmes like the BPF's Recovinyl initiative and the broader VinylPlus commitment from the European PVC industry — and the volumes flowing through them have grown year on year. There is no defensible reason to send a window to landfill in 2026.

The trade economics agree with the regulation. A clean fabricator offcut load earns a rebate. A site-strip frame load is collected free. A landfill skip costs you in tipping fees and tax. Recycling is the cheaper option before you've even opened the compliance argument — which is why the fabricators and installers we work with stopped sending uPVC to general waste years ago. We've written about that shift specifically in recycling fabricator offcuts.

What this means for your yard or site

If you're a fabricator generating clean offcuts, the priority is keeping streams separated at source. White-only in one cage, coloured/foil in another, sealed-unit and float glass routed to a dedicated stream. Cleaner segregation upstream means a higher rebate downstream.

If you're an installer pulling old frames off a job, you don't need to deglaze, you don't need to sort by colour, and you don't need a minimum tonnage. Stack them on the van or in a cage; we'll do the rest at the hub. The eWTN lands in your inbox within 24 hours of collection.

If you're a demolition contractor or a council framework manager pulling volume off housing stock, container sizing and scheduling become the conversation — same hubs, same line, just bigger boxes and longer-running placements.

Whichever you are, the answer to "what happens to old uPVC windows?" is the same. They get collected, separated, granulated, pelletised, and sold back into the next generation of profile, fence post, fascia board or sheet. Nothing buried. Nothing wasted. Get a quote or send us photos by email and we'll route the load to the nearest hub.