Integrating circular strategies at every step of our value chain

Sustainability

When does circularity really begin? For most people, it starts at the end of a product’s life cycle – where waste becomes visible.

Rethinking the meaning of circularity

At tesa, we see countless opportunities for circularity well before this point. By embedding circular strategies into every phase, from procurement to manufacturing to logistics, we transform invisible waste into visible progress.

The transition to a circular economy, in which materials continuously circulate through reuse, recycling, and recovery, requires more than just end-of-life solutions. Recycling post-consumer materials is important, but true circularity means rethinking the entire value chain. It’s about designing systems in which waste never even gets the chance to from in the first place.

In 2025, two projects took this approach to a new level. By recovering solvents in our manufacturing processes and recycling packaging materials across continents, we have transformed what once left our factories as waste into resources that now circulate through our system and directly contribute to our goal of sending less waste from our production activities to landfills.

Recovering solvents to enable circular production processes

Our journey toward a circular economy begins in our production halls, where solvents are used in the polymerization process, help refine the viscosity of our adhesives, ensure perfect adhesion to substrate materials, and are used to clean surfaces.

Having successfully recycled 75% (as of December 31, 2025) of the benzine used in our processes, our teams have now expanded this concept to enable circular economy approaches for another solvent: acetone.

Recycling acetone is a tricky task, but it becomes possible through partnership. The solvents from our production processes are collected via our solvent recovery systems. The water-soluble solvents are captured as a mixed stream and cannot be directly reused in this form. In partnership with a solvent distiller, acetone is recovered from this mixture in virgin-like quality. This high-quality recycled acetone can then be reintroduced into our production cycle.

This step toward a circular economy builds on our progress with benzine. We plan to replace approximately 700 metric tons of virgin acetone with recycled acetone in 2026, and up to 1,100 metric tons in subsequent years. Because the extremely energy-intensive manufacturing and refining process based on fossil raw materials is eliminated, this recycled acetone is significantly less CO₂-intensive than virgin material. Building on this success, our experts are now exploring similar recovery models for isopropanol and butanone to further expand the circular economy in production.

Giving packaging materials a second life

In addition to the switch to recyclable solvents, our teams also made significant progress in 2025 in another crucial area of the value chain: packaging. Plastic end walls are used to secure industrial adhesive tape rolls during transport from our site in Suzhou, China, to our tesa Manufacturing Hamburg facility. They are made of rigid polystyrene and fit precisely into the tesa® roll cores to hold the product securely in place.

A 3D-rendered box labeled tesa tape holds a blue cylinder, gray cap above, gray base below. A blue line appears on the right side. — End-walls made of polystyrene are used to hold and secure the products during transportation.

Simply reusing them was not possible because packaging in Europe requires end walls of different sizes. That is why our teams began exploring recycling options. In collaboration with one of tesa’s strategic packaging suppliers, Sonoco Plastics (opens in a new window or tab), the teams at tesa Manufacturing Hamburg and Packaging Industry developed a new process that ensures the recovery of valuable raw materials: Sonoco collects the end walls from tesa Manufacturing Hamburg and grinds them into granules, which are used exclusively to manufacture new end walls for tesa’s packaging in Europe.

An industrial robotic arm moves a box in a warehouse, seen through the cutout numbers 40,000 and tesa tape on a white background. — end-walls were shred and reformed into new end walls.

More than five metric tons of polystyrene from 4,000 end walls are now being recycled through this collaborative approach. The collection effort will continue in the coming years, transforming single-use packaging into a renewable material stream.

This initiative builds on our success in China, where tesa and its customers have established a reuse process for end walls, resulting in nearly 90,000 units being collected and approximately 90% being reused by 2025. Together, these successes demonstrate that promoting the circular economy in our production and supply chains reduces waste and conserves valuable resources without compromising product quality or performance.

We do: Push circularity

tesa will contribute to the circular economy and use resources as carefully as possible. First and foremost, this involves avoiding waste. Where that is not possible, we reduce it. Where waste is unavoidable, we seek to reuse or recycle it by various means. By 2025, we want to eliminate all landfill disposal of production-related waste.

tesa will further invest significantly in the further development of solvent-free and energy-efficient production technology and capacity. The facilities on which we currently coat with solvents are to be technically upgraded so that the solvents are fully recovered at the end of the process and thus remain in the cycle.

Last updated on 3 Nov 2026