South Shields Town Hall

End of life wet felt tiles were upcycled by Rockfon after South Tyneside Council specified new Rockfon Koral ceiling tiles for their town hall refurbishment.

When South Tyneside Council decided to refurbish South Shields Town Hall, they turned to Rockfon to help meet their sustainability targets. Initially, a 350m² area was refurbished to create a new occupational health centre and IT suite, and plans to fully refurbish the entire 16,000m² building are now well underway.

“The ability to recycle existing waste was a key factor for this project”, explained Gary Morgan, Architect for South Tyneside Council. “Through Rockfon’s upcycling service, we were able to arrange for all the existing wet felt ceiling tiles to be removed, packaged and sent to the ROCKWOOL factory in Wales for recycling. We then chose new Rockfon Koral ceilings to meet our high performance and aesthetic requirements for the refurbishment.”

Two and a half pallets of competitor wet felt waste were received at the ROCKWOOL factory for upcycling into the stone wool process. This helped to reduce waste to land fill from the refurbishment and also supports the AIS Ceilings Sustainability Partnership’s targets for finding alternate uses for waste in the ceiling industry.

Rockfon has been upcycling their own stone wool end-of-life ceiling tiles and off-cuts for many years. But now they will also accept wet felt mineral fibre ceiling tile waste of any age, in any quantity, from any refurbishment project, when Rockfon products are installed in its place. This diverts waste from landfill, helping contractors to meet their zero waste to landfill targets, and also helps clients achieve their environmental objectives.

Martin Westgate, Business Development Director at Robertson, who carried out the refurbishment for South Tyneside, explains: “Environmental sustainability is at the heart of the Robertson ethos and recycling the old ceiling tiles on behalf of the client and using Rockfon enabled us to achieve our objective of environmentally efficient construction".

Rockfon Koral ceiling tiles were specified for the Town Hall refurbishment as they combine an attractive micro-textured white surface with excellent acoustics, fire safety and humidity resistant properties. The tiles are available in a variety of formats to suit diverse applications, offering architects and designers the freedom to work with individual and straight forward ceiling designs.