CONSTRUCTION group Morgan Sindall has avoided an increase in the volume of waste being sent for landfill – by having disused hard hats recycled into site hoardings.

The company, whose extensive presence in East Anglia includes a base in Compair Crescent, Ipswich, has sent more than 4,000 old hats to a manufacturer to be moulded into environmentally-friendly boarding.

Morgan Sindall’s decision to recycle the old hats follows a re-branding earlier this year as a result of a merger of its design and infrastructure businesses.

Rather than disposing of hats with outdated logos, the company joined forces with plastic recycler 2K Manufacturing to turn the hats into EcoSheet boards.

“As a company, we make every effort to limit the amount of waste we send to landfill and try to reuse materials and old equipment wherever possible, so when our old branded hard hats had to be removed from service, we wanted to find a way of using them again,” said Brian Handcock, Morgan Sindall’s head of sustainability and environment.

The company collected hard hats from offices and construction sites all over the UK and transported them to 2K Manufacturing’s plant in Luton for moulding.

Peter Ball, 2K Manufacturing’s head of sales, said: “The groundbreaking technology we use to produce our award-winning EcoSheet boards is enabling us to bring a new lease of life to some of the four million hard hats that are produced each year in this country alone.”