Integrating circular strategies at every step of our value chain

At tesa, we see countless opportunities for circularity long before that moment. By embedding circular strategies at every stage, from sourcing to manufacturing to logistics, we transform invisible waste into visible progress. This is how we unlock the true potential of circularity and set new standards for sustainability in our industry.

The transition to a circular economy where materials continually flow through reuse, recycling, and recovery demands more than end of life solutions. Recycling post consumer materials is important, but true circularity means reimagining the entire value chain. It’s about designing systems where waste never even gets the chance to form.

In 2025, two projects took this approach to a new level. By recovering solvents within our manufacturing processes and recycling packaging materials across continents, we turned what once left our factories as waste into resources that now keep flowing through our system and contribute directly to our goal of sending zero waste from our production activities to landfill. And they also demonstrate our comprehensive commit-ment to accelerating the switch to circularity.

 

Our circular success story starts deep inside our production halls, where solvents are used during polymerization, help refine the viscosity of our adhesives, ensure the perfect bond with backing materials, and are being used for cleaning surfaces.
After managing to recycle 75 percent of the benzine used in our processes, our teams now have expanded this work to enable circular approaches to another solvent: Acetone.

Recycling acetone is a tricky task, but partnership makes it possible. Solvents from our production processes are collected through our solvent recovery units. The water-soluble solvents are captured as a mixed stream and cannot be reused directly in this form. Our partner, Orm Berggold GmbH, is able to recover acetone from this mixture in virgin-like quality. This high grade recycled acetone can then be reintroduced into our production cycle.

 

Alongside switching to circular solvents, our teams also made big progress in another crucial area of the value chain in 2025: packaging. Plastic end walls are used to secure industrial adhesive rolls during transport from our site in Suzhou, China, to our tesa Manufacturing facility in Hamburg. Made of rigid polystyrene, they fit exactly into the tesa® roll cores to hold the product securely in place.

 

GRAPHIC End walls made of polystyrene are used to hold and secure the products during transportation.

Simply reusing them was not feasible because packaging in Europe requires end walls of different sizes. That’s why our teams began exploring possibilities for recycling. In cooperation with one of tesa’s strategic packaging suppliers, Sonoco Plastics, the team developed a new process that ensures the recycling of valuable raw material : Sonoco collects the end walls from tesa Manufacturing and shreds them into granules that are exclusively used to produce new end walls for tesa’s packaging in Europe.

More than five tons of polystyrene from 4,000 end walls are now recycled via this collaborative approach - collection will continue in the upcoming years, turning single-use packaging into a renewable material stream. This initiative builds on our success from China, where tesa and its customers established a reuse process for end walls that led to almost 90,000 units being collected and around 90 percent reused in 2025. Together, these achievements demonstrate that advancing circularity across our production and supply chains reduces waste and conserves valuable resources – without compromising on product quality or performance.

 

Both initiatives reflect our ambition to embed circular principles throughout the entire tesa value chain from production to packaging, from design to delivery. By continuously identifying new opportunities to close material loops, we’re accelerating the shift toward a circular economy and keeping resources in motion where they belong: in the loop, not in the landfill.