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The Blog

Making paint synonymous with the circular economy

3 minutes of reading
Is it possible to create professional paint with a small carbon footprint and low emissivity? It is, with the start-up, CIRCOULEUR. It is an innovation from Matching Up that has been tested on our sites!
circouleur peinture économie circulaire
CIRCOULEUR creates new, professional paints from over 70% recycled material, and is unprecedented in France. Thanks to its recycling branch, the start-up upgrades leftover paint, stopping the paint being incinerated and reducing the amount of raw materials needed to make it. A smaller carbon footprint and purer indoor air The result? The carbon footprint of the paint is twelve times smaller, making it the lowest on the market. Better yet, with CIRCOULEUR paint, the VOC (volatile organic compounds) emissions are also greatly reduced. This reduction positively impacts the indoor air quality. And this was what piqued the interest of Sébastien Chauvet and Damien Haultcoeur, agency manager at Linkcity and director of Open Innovation at Bouygues Bâtiment Centre-Sud-Ouest respectively, who teamed up with the start-up in October 2017 during a Matching Up event. At the time, working with a big group was a first for CIRCOULEUR. Production was not yet on an industrial scale and they needed to find a suitable site for a realistic trial. After a few months, a site was found. It was GINKO A2.2 in Bordeaux. The trial started in November 2018. test circouleur bouygues construction chantier

And the collaboration yielded results, as Marianne Rittaud, a partner at CIRCOULEUR, explains. “Working with Bouygues Construction allowed us to test our product in real-life conditions and to develop it and adapt it to the requirements of the site. This also represented a fantastic opportunity to speed up the process because we had to quickly produce sizeable volumes. With this partnership, the development of the recycling branch was encouraged.”

“By working quickly, with a responsive contact person and a strong capacity for innovation and adaptation of the final processes and products, we were able to collaborate and end up with a paint which corresponded exactly to our needs”, explains Damien Haultcoeur. With the first trial concluded, there are plans for more soon to be carried out by Bouygues Bâtiment Ile-de-France (Habitat Résidentiel) for Linkcity at the Paris 13 Bruneseau site and the Antony Marché site, which will allow for trials of the paint in a show flat. One of the ABC project’s accommodation sites in Grenoble will also serve as a trial before CIRCOULEUR can be listed amongst the official providers of Bouygues Construction with a framework agreement. “And we may even be able to convince our partners in turn to use this low VOC emissivity and small carbon footprint paint”, predicts Damien Haultcoeur. “The ideal would be that recycled paints are used as standard throughout Bouygues Construction and that paint made from new materials is the exception. We also hope to work with the Group on ‘Zero Waste’ sites in order to be able to offer the collection of leftover paint pots when construction is finished and thus guarantee that our own leftover paint is recycled. We would be going a full circle, a real dream of the circular economy! “, concludes Marianne Rittaud. And this dream could become reality, since two Zero Waste sites (Quartier des Fabriques in Marseille and a Rénovation Privée site in Paris) will soon be experimenting with this solution.