Sustainability is a key issue in the UK market, and its importance is growing year on year. Consumers are increasingly ‘voting with their wallets’ and looking for sustainable manufacturers of furniture and joinery products. But sustainability doesn’t just come from your own manufacturing processes; it also comes from your suppliers.
For Leitz Tooling UK, sustainability is a core focus of the company and its products, from tool design and manufacture through to the actual applications and machining. Leitz engineers its tooling to be as sustainable as possible and to pass on these benefits to furniture and joinery manufacturers across the UK.
When it comes to tool manufacturing, Leitz production and service plants – both in the UK and across the globe – are all supplemented by solar energy, heavily reducing CO2 emissions from their manufacturing processes. In 2024, Leitz UK saved 228 tons of CO2 through the solar power initiative and also passed on all excess power back into the grid. Sharpening services, like diamond tool erosion, were supplemented by solar, reducing the carbon footprint of serviced tooling across its entire life cycle.
The tools themselves are designed with sustainability in mind. Key products from Leitz, such as the ProfilCut Q profiling cutterhead system, are economically designed to reduce waste and power consumption when used. Thanks to the higher quality performance, Leitz cutters typically only require one pass. This means manufacturers save costs and waste by avoiding test cuts and limiting post-processing like sanding.
The tool bodies themselves are aerodynamically designed with lightweight materials to reduce power consumption when machining compared to common market solutions. The added benefit to this lightweight tool design is that they cause less wear on machinery, further reducing environmental impact through machinery part replacement and power consumption.
Leitz only uses high-grade PCD or Tungsten Carbide materials in its cutters. By using special carbide grades designed for customer applications, Leitz is proud to claim that its cutters “outperform most tooling on the market in terms of tool life”. For manufacturers, this results in lower tooling costs and less wastage from constant replacements of end-of-life tooling.
Leitz also operates a global carbide recycling programme where 95% of collected carbide is recycled into new cutting materials.
Being vertically integrated, Leitz Group operates one of Europe’s largest carbide manufacturing facilities. This means Leitz controls the carbide quality on its tools and tunes each tool for its specific application, improving performance and tool life.
Recycled carbide is broken down into its core elements of carbonised tungsten and cobalt. This is rebuilt into specific grades to be used on Leitz tools. This recycling programme has resulted in a 70% reduction in energy consumption through raw material recycling, and up to 40% less CO2 emissions through recovery in the carbide manufacturing process.
WeCare – a global sustainability initiative
Leitz runs an annual sustainability campaign called WeCare every April-May. The WeCare campaign takes place in over 40 countries and involves about 2,200 employees globally. With a mixed focus on social responsibility and environmental protection, in 2025, Leitz undertook an impressive 415 projects globally.
Across 33 countries, Leitz employees donated 109 litres of blood, collected 2,100KG in food and clothing donations and removed 1.7 Tons of waste from the environment and our waterways. In the UK, Leitz staff took to the forest behind the Harlow factory to conduct a clean-up and managed to remove 100KG of rubbish, including car parts and stripped copper wire insulation.
The team also worked with local charities to donate clothing and food to the homeless in Leeds and fundraised for wellbeing and social charities such as the Butterfly Effect Harlow, or Roots To Wellbeing.
Believing that children are the future, Leitz sponsored a school, Walter Waltham PTA, to ensure the children had an outside learning area and supported the planting of flower areas across the school grounds.
Unlock savings and sustainability with a tooling review, free of charge
Leitz has also started to offer free tooling reviews for all manufacturers. Leitz sends in technical representatives to assess your tooling and check that it is safe, legally compliant, right for the application and sustainable.
Leitz can recommend new machining strategies to reduce wastage or new tooling solutions to simplify processes and reduce cycle times. All have a knock-on effect of sustainability by reducing wastage and improving efficiency.
“These inspections really are quite valuable,” says Ian Selby, Managing Director of window manufacturer, Timbawood. “The inspection in itself helps to create a culture of ‘safety & compliance’. It would be valuable to any joinery workshop, not only from a health & safety perspective, but also from a productivity perspective.”
Ready to enhance your company’s sustainability and efficiency? Contact Leitz today to learn more about its comprehensive sustainability efforts and to schedule your free tooling review.
01279 454530
