profile
Matt Williams
Matt Williams is the Managing Director at Polypipe Building Products, joining the business in May 2023 from TradeKart Limited where he held the position of Operations Director. Prior to that, Matt held Operational Leadership roles at RWC and AkzoNobel, where he enjoyed great success in business transformation, process optimisation, and operational excellence.
Polypipe Building Products are part of the Sustainable Building Solutions Business Unit within Genuit, focusing on providing a range of solutions to reduce carbon content in the built environment.
Polypipe Building Products is the UK’s leading manufacturer of plastic piping systems and low-carbon heating solutions for the residential market. They design, develop, and manufacture over 20,000 product lines which are stocked in plumbers and builders’ merchants nationally.
Polypipe
Polypipe Building Products, part of Genuit Group, is one of Europe’s largest and most innovative manufacturers of plastic piping systems and low-carbon heating solutions for the residential market. At Polypipe Building Products, we specialise in products for domestic properties for both the new build and RMI markets with over 5,000 products to suit any installation in a range of aesthetics. Over our 40-year exitance, we have grown from a small plastic pipe manufacturer based in Doncaster, to a group of 17 businesses helping the UK construction industry build better and more sustainably.
As Genuit group, we consider ourselves thought leaders in the future sustainable built environment and we provide construction solutions way beyond plastic pipes and fittings, ranging from MVHR and SuDS systems to magnetic filters and anti-corrosion chemicals.
Our goal is to innovate and improve our products and services to help the UK reach net zero targets and to influence the market to drive towards future best practices and systems. With recent Part L building regulations updates, the steppingstone to the Future Homes Standard arriving in 2025, the heating of homes has suddenly become possibly the single biggest challenge facing UK housing developers and housing providers. The next few years will see the most fundamental change in heating domestic properties since gas boilers and steel radiators became commonplace during the late 1970’s and 80’s. Gas is being phased out as an energy source and heat pumps are being pushed by the government as a more sustainable electric heat source. This leads to opportunities for new and different heat emitters to be explored as heating solutions such as Underfloor Heating. This focus on decarbonisation is leading to a much higher level of insulation as standard in new build homes, which runs a very real risk of the challenge to heat homes quickly become a challenge to keep homes cool, particularly with record summer temperatures being regularly broken and expected to continue to get hotter. For this reason, heating and cooling must be considered in tandem in order to provide truly better homes for the future.
I am therefore joining the BMBI Experts panel to provide a specific focus on heating and cooling while we work together as an industry to provide solutions to this challenge. At Genuit we have ready-made complete solutions to heating and cooling of homes and we will continue to invest in renewable technologies to drive sustainable living.
Visit: www.polypipe.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/polypipe/
Twitter: @PolypipeTrade
Launched in 2015, the award winning monthly Builders Merchant Building Index (BMBI) report is the only reliable measure of repair, maintenance & improvement (RMI) activity in the UK. Filling an important gap, it can be widely used in construction, and by economists, Government, national media, commentators and influencers outside the industry.
Polypipe Comment: Q1 2024
In Quarter 1 2024, market activity was somewhat subdued with house building remaining at similarly low levels to Q3 and Q4 2023. The delayed General Election decision and a lack of direct support for housing in the Spring Budget is further delaying major projects from taking off.
At Polypipe, we are keen to ensure that plastic, as a building material, is fully understood in terms of its sustainability and usability benefits over legacy materials. Plastic, the material, often gets a bad rap, mainly due to its association with single-use plastics and their association with inadequate disposal and recycling processes. However, rigid plastic can in fact be a more sustainable offering than legacy and alternative materials. As a building material, rigid, engineered plastics are very long lasting and have been proven to be capable of being recycled many times over without noticeable loss of functional integrity or performance.
One of the endless on-site debates within the residential plumbing industry is plastic versus copper. As a plumbing material, plastic offers improved health and safety due to the lack of hot works, much greater innovation in installer-friendly technology, as well as the reusability of fittings, and a greatly reduced risk of theft. Ease of installation, using push-fit plastics, often translates into heavily reduced time and cost on site. Polypipe Building Products has recently relaunched the PolyPlumb range of plastic plumbing with new PolyPlumb Enhanced, now in both grey and white.
Polypipe Building Products has the widest and deepest range of kitemarked and certified products in the UK plumbing and drainage market – and we are passionate about quality. We’re also currently building our portfolio of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and working towards the Code for Construction Products Information (CCPI) to meet and exceed data requirements for our customers now and in the future. The building industry is increasingly demanding more and better data from its manufacturers, which ultimately leads to better visibility to ensure building safety and performance. Recently we achieved gold standard with the Supply Chain Sustainability School, the highest level of accreditation, to demonstrate our dedication and work towards our sustainability and decarbonisation targets.