Be my Guest… Hugo Gerrets
In celebration of Earth Day today (April 22) with this year’s theme ‘Planet Vs Plastics’, we speak to Hugo Gerrets, business development director, Lifting Solutions Group (LSG), recipient of the LEEA Awards 2023 Sustainability category, to see how their Aspire range is making a difference.
“The Planet Vs Plastics campaign is a call to arms, a demand that we act now to end the scourge of plastics and safeguard the health of every living being upon our planet,” says Kathleen Rogers, president, Earth Day.
Plastics extend beyond an imminent environmental issue; they present a grave threat to human health as alarming as climate change. As plastics break down into microplastics, they release toxic chemicals into our food and water and circulate through the air we breathe. Plastic production now has grown to more than 380 million tons per year. More plastic has been produced in the last 10 years than in the entire 20th century, and the industry plans to grow explosively for the indefinite future.
“We actually have some products in our Powertex range, which covers all kind of lifting equipment such as chain hoists, chains and components as well as textile slings, webbing slings, round slings and web lashings. And for those products, we made an equivalent using r-Pet which we brought to the market in June 2023,” said Gerrets.
“Winning the LEEA Sustainable Award felt like a big reward for us for all the hard work we put into the project. It was more or less two years of preparation.
“In regard to the Powertex r-PET range, we exchange Virgin PET, which is polyester for recycled PET, so we have a different source of raw material. We started the project looking at what products will be safe and strong enough if we change the raw material and we have done a lot of research on that, using a third-party climate consultancy to make sure all the calculations are correct.
“We save between 40% and 70% of CO2 emissions just by exchanging the raw material source. The production process for the rest is not so different, but it's really changing the raw material, which has a huge impact. And since we are moving them by the thousands, we hope to get the market ready for this change so we can work towards a better planet.
“We are already discussing with other partners in the market to add more products to the range because we think it's quite important in the world of today where you see a lot of Greenwashing, companies claiming to make things better than they actually are. But we think it's important to communicate this in the right way and there is a growing demand for that from customers.”
Gerrets said LSG is seeing a lot of interest with its products in the renewables industry, as well as any other companies interested in sustainability as a whole.
Next, LSG is continuously looking for better options than we have today from a sustainability point of view, and how it can make improvements. It has also started to discuss with its suppliers and steel manufacturers usage of green steel and how to recycle webbing slings and polyester slings in order to reuse them.
Click HERE to watch the video on LEEA YouTube channel.
Visit https://globalliftingawarenessday.com to see how you can take part in this year’s #GLAD2024.
