Healthy plasterboard, healthy homes and a healthy environment
John Jamison

Winstone Wallboards has made some big steps forward over the last 15 years to ensure as an organisation, we make better use of our existing materials to reduce, reuse and recycle where we can. Ultimately, we’re focused on contributing positively towards the creation of healthier homes in New Zealand as well as reducing our impact on the environment.

Making the most of how we make our products

We look at every part of the manufacturing process to see what can be done to make our products have less impact on the environment, from controlling water discharge that includes suspended solids to removing the need to use solvents
containing halogenated hydrocarbons.

The wide range of GIB® plasterboard lengths and widths that a readily available helps to reduce wastage. We’ve also introduced initiatives like our GIB® cut-to-length service (minimum order quantity and lead times apply) to reduce the amount of waste that could potentially end up in landfill. These services allows builders to order the most efficient lengths and reduces the finishing time – a win-win for everyone.

Getting gypsum back to basics

Plasterboard is comprised mostly of naturally occurring gypsum, which is blended with 100% recycled paper and small quantities of other ingredients. Gypsum is infinitely recyclable, and converting it back into plasterboard as well gypsum
products like compost not only enriches New Zealand soils, but acts as a super growth booster for fruit such as avocados.

As well as recycling our plasterboard manufacturing waste into composting materials, our Tauranga manufacturing plant will also have an onsite recycling facility which will enable GIB® plasterboard to include a portion of recycled gypsum, with the expectation that this will grow over time.

In 2019, we introduced onsite plasterboard recycling services in the Auckland region in partnership with Green Gorilla, which now recycles around four million kilogrammes of plasterboard from building sites each year.

Partnerships have also been expanded into other part of New Zealand too, and plasterboard recycling services (link to appropriate page on website) are now available in the Waikato, Nelson, Christchurch and Central Otago regions with hopes of more operators coming on board in the future.

Environmental performance

Global GreenTag is one of the world’s most robust, trusted and widely recognised certification programmes, with products tested against sustainability criteria like greenhouse gas emissions, health and ecotoxicity as well as analysis on the lifecycle of a product.

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Winstone Wallboards received GreenTag Level A Certification for six of our products, including GIB® Standard, GIB Fyreline® and GIB Noiseline®, and Level C Certification for GIB Ultraline®, GIB X-Block® products. This is thanks to huge
efforts across the entire Winstone Wallboards team to ensure our products continue to meet high standards of environmental performance.

Our GIB Aqualine®, GIB Weatherline®, GIB Barrierline®, GIB Toughline® and GIB Toughline® Aqua products also hold GECA (Good Environmental Choice Australia) Ecolabel certification, which is a recognised multi-sector ecolabelling program across New Zealand and Australia that supports significant improvement in the sustainability of products.

The Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) for GIB® plasterboard has also recently been updated and renewed. The EPD quantifies the environmental performance of GIB® plasterboard including its carbon footprint, embodied energy
and other environmental data.

We’re well on our way to not only significantly reducing our own environmental impact but also helping the sector work more efficiently by repurposing and reusing waste construction plasterboard, which is not only good for our environment, but good for New Zealand homes too.

Want to know more?

Find out more about Winstone Wallboards approach to sustainability and the environmental performance of our products here.