The Vita Group wins prestigious Innovation award at UTECH

The Vita Group, Europe’s leading flexible foam solutions provider, has won the prestigious Innovation Award for two products, VitaRest Origin™ pillow and Orbis™ foam range at the 2021 UTECH Europe conference.

The event, held in Maastricht, Netherlands, is the leading exhibition and conference for the global Polyurethane industry. The awards are judged by leading industry professionals and Vita peers, making receiving this award particularly special.

Ian Robb, CEO at The Vita Group, said:

“Well done to the Vita team of engineers and chemists, who have relentlessly pursued the possibility of producing foam from recycled materials. Vita is at the vanguard of sustainability, and it is important to us to stay there. Our ESG agenda is ambitious. We are aiming to have sustainably-sourced options in 50% of our product range by 2030 and achieve net-zero for the group by 2050.”

• Orbis™ is one of Vita’s sustainable foam collections, created as a direct result of the unique partnership between The Vita Group and Dow Chemical and our involvement in the RENUVA™ Mattress Recycling Program. Our flexible PU foams are made with RENUVA™ polyols – a raw material derived from recycled foam mattress content. More recently, The Vita Group have also partnered with Evonik, which will allow us to expand our ability to increase the production of Orbis™ while contributing to the reduction of 40 million mattresses ending up in landfill sites.
• The VitaRest Origin™ pillow is made with bio polyols which reduce the environmental impact of its composition. VitaRest Origin™ foam has been infused with naturally occurring and sustainably sourced castor oil. VitaRest Origin’s open-call viscoelastic polyurethane foam responds to body heat and pressure points, maintaining the right balance between comfort and support.

Vita has a long heritage of exploring innovative, sustainable products and solutions. In the 1970s, we introduced round block foam to reduce waste. In 2000 we became the first in Europe to manufacture flexible foams using sustainably sourced polyols. Today, Vita has a collection of sustainable PU foam ranges that include: Origin™, made using plant-based bio polyols; Nemus™, created using polyols derived from captured CO2; and Orbis™ from recycled post-consumer mattresses.

This innovation stems from The Vita Group’s commitment to reducing the environmental impact of its products while ensuring its customers receive high-quality materials. A central aspect of this is driving circularity by reducing the amount of waste created during the production process, broadening our scope of raw materials, increasing recycling, and decreasing the use of fossil fuels.

We take sustainability seriously. 100% of Vita’s trim foam is recycled and rebonded into a range of products such as carpet underlay, foam shock pads for sports pitches, landscaping and children’s playgrounds. Currently, over 30,000T of Vita’s process trim goes back into Vita’s recycling processes to be turned into new products. These products reduce raw material purchases and stop tens of thousands of tons of material from going into landfills every year.