Sustainability and circularity are key consumer priorities, influencing purchasing decisions. While many industries have adopted these principles, others are slower to integrate them, viewing circularity as a customer-desired attribute rather than a strategic opportunity for gain.
Although only 13% of shoppers are currently willing to pay more for sustainable products, millennials are more motivated, with the best demographic being millennials in Asia at just below 20%.
Source: Euromonitor International Voice of the Consumer: Lifestyles Survey, fielded January-February 2024 (n=40,732)
The DIY bonding products sector faces challenges in waste recovery, contamination, and operational costs, limited by resistance in passing extra costs forward to shoppers. Proactive players can seize significant opportunities, while those ignoring these issues face substantial, even existential, risks.
An astonishing 97% of DIY bonding product waste escapes the loop
The bonding products sector discards only 1% of waste during manufacturing and virtually none during distribution due to efficient logistics. However, 9% of waste is lost during in-home application, left in the packaging at end of project. However, the most critical issue arises at end-of-life disposal of waste, where 87% of product volume escapes the loop, highlighting significant circularity challenges.
Waste contamination, reverse last-mile logistics of waste recovery, and lack of financial incentives due to recycling challenges in today’s polymer formulations are major barriers to circularity in the paint and bonding sector, especially in the final product lifecycle stages. Consequently, only about 3% of waste is recovered and reused or reintegrated into production, even in developed countries.
These challenges lead industry executives to view the task as "impossible" or too resource-intensive, perpetuating the current scenario. This inaction increases risks of being seen as environmentally unfriendly, and of corrective regulation. The bonding industry faces a delicate situation where its products risk being avoided or replaced by alternatives that address environmental concerns.
The sector needs to close its own loop, not just reuse waste helping other industries close theirs
The home improvement and gardening industry is responding to consumer pressure for sustainability, focusing on climate change and carbon emissions. However, it lags in circularity compared to neighbouring industries. The paint and adhesive sectors can make noises about packaging circularity, but product circularity is proving a lot harder to solve.
At USD274 billion a year, the spend tied to bonding products is 68% of all spend on DIY, because the circularity for floor and wall coverings, sinks and sanitaryware are all linked to bonding products too.
Source: Euromonitor International, Home and Garden 2024 edition
To date, paint and bonding companies claim 100% circularity by reusing waste that matches their own end-of-life waste by volume. While this helps close the loop for another sector, it does nothing to address the end of life for bonding products, leading to a critical gap in sustainability efforts.
Initiatives like Tesa’s removable tape solutions, MagFace’s magnetic wall coatings, and Leroy Merlin’s sustainable Home Index aim to improve the circularity of the industry, but these efforts are building blocks to a larger complete solution.
To avoid being replaceable by more circular alternatives, the sector will need to escalate its efforts. Emerging products like coloured concrete, click-together tiles, and magnetic wall and floor coverings reducing demand for paint and adhesives position themselves as more eco-friendly substitutes. This growing disruption to the core bonding mission is forewarning of a need for the paint and bonding industry to prioritise circularity and proactively reshape its practices to survive evolving shopper (and regulatory) expectations.
Designing for deconstruction and fostering collaboration are critical steps towards overcoming barriers to circularity
The concept of "designing for deconstruction" emerges as a pivotal strategy for addressing circularity challenges. This approach involves developing products with their eventual disassembly and recycling in mind from the start, making it easier to recover materials at the end of their lifecycle. Incorporating features for easy removal and separation reduces contamination and enhances material recovery efficiency, promoting more options for end of life. This leads to ideas like tensile strength for core missions, and sheer weakness de-bonding at end of life; in formulation, it means solving cross-linked polymers.
Greater industry collaboration across the value chain is crucial for achieving complete circularity in the paint and bonding sectors. Partnerships between manufacturers, retailers, waste management services, and the DIFM trade have the process control needed to solve the challenges. This collaboration can enhance sustainability efforts and drive industry-wide change.
Collaborating companies share knowledge, resources, and technologies to address end-of-life challenges, aligning consumer, industry and regulatory interests. Without such collaboration, the industry risks new regulations forcing a timeline on unprepared brands and disruption from substitutions offering circular solutions. Dialogues on this topic are starting to be visible between stakeholders in the sector, as companies conclude they can’t fix this alone in their silo.
The product we sell today is the waste we will need to recover and find value from in 14 years’ time (on average across different bonding product refresh and renovation cycles), so the clock is ticking.
Solving barriers in polymer formulation by the end of 2026 means we can really start closing this loop in 2040…and counting.
Read our article on Obligation to Opportunity: Closing a Circular Loop in DIY for more analysis on the circularity topic in the bonding sector.
For more on the latest sustainability trends, check out this article, Top Five Innovations in Sustainability in Q4 2024.