It all starts with a feedstock dream team such as berries, coffee, cork, olives, etc. associated with a good feeling, a sense of comfort and luxury. This feedstock generates a sidestream at end-of-life or after processing. Berry seeds, coffee grounds, cork dust, olive leaves, etc. Orineo is now upcycling these sidestreams into stimulating materials by combining them with biobased resins.
Touch of Nature is based on 3 principles:
Credibility |
The materials are bio-based and look natural. |
Sincerity |
There is a story behind the chosen ingredients to ensure a customer well-being. |
Stimulation |
Our materials mobilise the senses. They look good, feel good and smell good. Customers want to live with these materials. |
Touch of Nature improves the quality of life for people.
Touch of Nature addresses people’s expectations comprehensively. The intuition is triggered by the sincere and credible feedstock story. The relationship between fond memories and Touch of Nature materials creates an emotional response. The personalised look, texture and pattern further mobilises the senses. The functionality and properties of the materials reassures the ratio.
Touch of Nature, a balanced mind.
Touch of Nature from start to finish
CREATION
PROCESSING
CONSUMPTION
SIDESTREAM
RE-USE
Touch of Nature: the facts.
Touch of Nature is a work in progress. Renewable content currently varies between 75 and 80%. Together with its suppliers, Orineo is continuously working to increase the renewable content of the Touch of Nature formulation, to achieve a 100% biobased product. The raw materials used in Touch of Nature are all procured in Europe. Even when the original feedstock (coffee beans, some berries) are produced outside Europe, the sidestreams used in Touch of Nature are generated locally.
Read more about the story of some of our raw materials
Belgians are consuming 60,000 T of roasted coffee annually, generating a 50,000 T coffee grounds mountain. Most of it ends in landfills. While it is difficult to collect coffee grounds from homes, we can do this for the 10,000 T coffee grounds produced in commercial outlets, enough to cover 20M sq.m or 4,000 football pitches.
Orineo is sourcing its coffee grounds from selected coffee shops in Belgium, with a similar vision on the management of raw materials.
Berries are processed industrially to make pulp, juices, purees, etc. for further use in the food industry. Seeds are a co-product of this process and are collected as source of oil. Raspberry seed oil, cranberry seed oil, blueberry seed oil are all oils rich in poly-unsaturated fatty acids, with a proper ω6/ω3 ratio and delicate flavor. The oil extraction process generates a lignocellulosic press cake, a new side stream. For each kg of berry seed oil, you obtain 800-950 g of press cake. Creating a market for this press cake makes it possible to sell the healthy oil at an acceptable price and reduces the overall environmental footprint of berry processing.
Orineo purchases berry seed press cake exclusively in Belgium. No organic solvents are used in the production process.
Cork is a wonder of nature. It is designed to protect the tree against aggressive climate, bush fires, grazing animals and moulds. It provides shelter to wildlife and income to local population. As a consequence, cork oak forests are considered a ‘National Trust’ area in Southern Europe.
It takes 25 years before a cork tree can be stripped of its cork layer for the first time. Following harvests are only possible after 9 years. The cork oak is the only tree whose bark regenerates, acquiring a smoother texture following each harvest. Oaks can live for over 200 years and can be stripped around 17 times. As the tree is never felled, cork is truly a highly sustainable product.
The downside is the limited availability of fresh cork, as this follows the slow rhythm of nature. This is why we looked into cork stoppers, the main application for cork as feedstock for Touch of Nature materials. At Orineo, we teamed up with social economy initiatives that collects used cork stoppers, sorts them and grinds them to our specifications. When used in Touch of Nature materials, this adds an extra 10-20 years of life to cork, well beyond the renewal rate.
As some recycled cork stoppers are made from agglomerated granules, it is possible to find traces of synthetic glue used for the cork agglomeration process in the Touch of Nature product. We believe that this downside to our credo is largely compensated by the benefits of upcycling used cork stoppers in a long-term, valuable application.
Olives are usually harvested by shaking the tree. This releases the olives that are collected in a net around the tree. Together with olives, a lot of olive leaves are also collected and only separated from the olives in the processing factory. Some leaves are further processed to extract active ingredients for nutraceuticals and other health products. Most leaves, as well as the extraction residues are discarded.
Orineo has supply agreements with a large olive tree-derived ingredient producer to further process their leave residues in Touch of Nature products.
