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Becoming Net Positive: At CASTORAMA, nothing is lost, everything is transformed!

4. Environment

Green design

Context

With its 102 stores and 12,600 employees, Castorama has been helping its customers improve their homes for more than 40 years. Environment is at the heart of its strategy. Along with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Castorama innovates by developing products which favour circular economy and help its customers make their projects of a positive home come to life.

Objectives

  • Creating value for customers with products derived from recycled materials from waste
  • Innovating to optimize resources at every stage of the product's life: manufacturing, use and end of life

APPROACH

In 2013 was launched the development of the INIFINITE kitchen worktop, made in France using wastes recovered in the stores (recycled plastics and lost pallets wood). Working on the potential of the wastes produced by the stores and the customers, Castorama had an idea: use them as raw materials to design innovative products. It took almost a year to move from the idea of the production of the kitchen worktop to its marketing in the stores.

Meanwhile, the problem of deployment arose. To solve it, workshops were created in order to integrate circular economy in the design stage of our products:

During the first workshop (1/2 day) of awareness raising on the definition, advantages and limits of the rating criteria of circular economy products: a 10 questions Excel tool helps evaluating the products from different points of view (origin of materials, lifetime, recycling channel) before validation by Biorégional.

The 2nd workshop (1 day) broadens the idea the Cradle to Cradle global concept, which ranges from the product design at the earliest stages to its recovery at the end of its life. The creativity sessions make new products and services related to the improvement of home come to life, and they are compared in terms of circular economy level. The strong point of this workshop was starting with customer needs and then estimating the possibility of integrating circular economy upstream in the products design.

• The 3rd workshop (1 day) helps prioritizing the products categories in circular economy and establishing a road map of concrete development of products. A decision support tool based on two main lines (customer benefits and conformity with commercial policy) enables to quantify and date concrete projects with the support of the commercial, product innovation and private label teams.

In addition to the cost of the workshop days (about 18,000€), the challenge was to make every player in the process of supply creation adhere to a new way of working, aiming mainly at obtaining clearly identifed and valuable customer benefits.

CONTRIBUTION TO COMPANY PERFORMANCE

  • Potential equivalent to the revenue of 2 stores by 2016
  • Implementation of a true circular economy sector with the various suppliers in the supply chain
  • Raising awareness of over 3,000 employees during 2013 products collection

Benefits

  • For the worktop, 2,500 tons of waste transformed into raw materials with the 90% recycled PEFC label.
  • The share of re-sold sorted wastes rose  from 12% in 2010 to 34% in 2013
  • 120 eco-circularity projects will be studied by the end of 2016
Workforce
12600 (2014)
Turnover
2 900 000 K€ ( HT Net 2013)
Country
France

CASTORAMA

Zone Activité
59175 TEMPLEMARS

www.castorama.fr

Mise à jour le 28/06/2016

Creative Commons Attribution This work by Réseau Alliances – World Forum Lille is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.