Gafa 2019: sustainability, future, and people at the centre

The 2019 edition of Gafa has come to a close, further strengthening our awareness and commitment towards sustainability, and making us happy and proud for the opportunity of celebrating our first 50 years of business with our partners.

In a green area built using sustainable materials and depicting an actual garden, with plants, benches and lawn, we introduced a brand new 100% biodegradable concept of hose from renewable sources.

The circular economy is today the new frontier: It’s what we are moving to, thanks to our fifty-year experience and a research team of 40 people, who each and every day come up with new materials, replacing traditional PVC, or strongly reducing the quantities of raw materials in our product range.

But the prototype presented at Gafa is not our first step towards sustainability: as shown by the material time line on the background of the stand, respect for the environment and for people have always been the drivers of our research and development activities. 2007 saw in fact the launch of Acua, the first FCU – Food Contact Use – patented phthalate-free PVC hose, and Native, the first PVC-free hose. In 2010 we launched the patented Bios range, consisting of hoses made using vegetable components.

And process sustainability is for us just as important as product sustainability. This is why every year we use more than 8,000 tonnes of regenerated PVC granules, 30% of which from internally developed transformation process – using all our production waste -, and the remaining 70% from other markets, such as the automotive and the building sectors. We have also installed two cogeneration plants in the Sandrigo and Fara Vicentino facilities, improving our energy efficiency and reducing carbon dioxide emissions, in addition to avoiding collecting water from groundwater reservoirs.

Gafa gave us a great opportunity for looking at the future and the responsibility that we feel towards future generations, but also a chance to look at our past, and celebrate our first 50 years of history together with our partners.

50 years of conscious, responsible, sustainable and proactive business activity. This is and has always been our way of doing business. And irrespective of the pressure or the magnitude of the challenges, or whether we are faced with the passing of time or the flowing of a liquid, this is also the entrepreneurial spirit that will continue to feed our values and our relations, our projects, products and services.