From tomato stem to building panels

Description

At the end of 2023, together with Renewi, Building Balance, Seawood Materials, and Baars & Bloemhoff, SAM Panels launched a consortium for an ambitious and innovative project: developing a complete value chain in which low-grade greenhouse horticulture waste streams from the Greenport West-Holland region in the Province of South Holland are upgraded into high-quality and sustainable panel material. Central to this project is the utilization of tomato foliage—a residual stream that traditionally represents little economic value—as a raw material for circular applications.

The objective of the project is clear: to transform tomato foliage into a commercially viable panel material that can compete with existing, non-biobased alternatives. In doing so, we contribute to a circular economy, reduce residual waste, and create new value within the regional greenhouse horticulture chain.

To achieve this goal, the project was executed in phases. In the first phase, the focus was on optimizing the raw material. The tomato foliage was collected, processed, and refined to make it suitable as fiber input for panel material production. Properties such as fiber length, homogeneity, and processability were examined during this process.

Subsequently, extensive tests were conducted on an R&D scale. In this phase, various fiber combinations and pressing conditions were investigated to achieve a panel with the desired mechanical and aesthetic properties. This development phase resulted in successful test panels demonstrating that tomato foliage is technically suitable as a basis for high-quality panel material.

The final step consisted of scaling up to a commercial format. A crucial link in this process was reducing the size and preparing the raw material for industrial production for the first production run. This step was made possible by the efforts of Waardewenders. Thanks to their contribution, the chain could be fully closed and the first full production run could be realized.

The first commercial production took place at the end of 2025. The result: a full pallet of panels produced from regional tomato foliage. With this, an important milestone has been reached in the high-quality valorization of an agricultural waste stream, and the foundation has been laid for further scaling up and market introduction.