Komposittrall Direct From Our Own Extrusion Line — WPC Decking for Sweden

The Season Is the Whole Planning Problem

Every market has a decking season. Sweden has a short one, and because it is short it is also synchronised — your customers all want the same thing in the same eight weeks. That single fact should shape how you buy, and it is the first thing we would talk about.

Sea time plus production means you are buying a season ahead

Transit is about 50 days port to port, and production runs before that and is confirmed against your volume when we quote. Add the two together and the arithmetic is plain: an order placed in autumn is stock on the ground for spring. An order placed in April is stock for the following year.

This is not a warning, it is a planning tool. Distributors who order in September start the season with stock while their competitors are quoting lead times. Tell us the season you are buying for rather than the date you want the container, and we will work backwards to the production slot with you.

Which is why the minimum order is 70 m²

A short season makes a large speculative first order genuinely risky, and we would rather you tested a colour and our paperwork on 70 m² than committed to a 40HQ on faith. Freight per unit improves as you approach a full container, so most accounts grow into one — but the first order does not have to be one.

And why a repeat order has to be the same batch

If the season goes well you will want more of exactly what you sold. Pigment goes into the extrusion, so a second run of the same colour will not be identical to the first. The way round it is to buy the season in one batch and hold the buffer yourself. On a job that will be extended next year — a hotel, a restaurant terrace, a housing scheme phased over two summers — say so at the quotation stage so the whole quantity is run together.

The Decking Range

Capped co-extrusion and classic uncapped, hollow and solid. Six of the sections ordered most often — the full schedule runs to well over a hundred.

Co-extrusion 23 × 138

Capped, hollow · 2.85 kg/m

The main capped section. This is the profile our slip test was run on.

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Co-extrusion 23 × 148

Capped, hollow, premium

Wider capped board, four-sided cap. Fewer boards and fewer clips across a large terrace.

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Co-extrusion solid 20 × 140

Capped, solid core

Solid throughout. Specified for commercial traffic and exposed edges.

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3D embossed, round chamber

Deep-grain surface

Heavier embossing than a standard woodgrain, in the capped construction.

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3D embossed, square chamber

Deep-grain surface

Same surface, square-cell core. Lower cost per square metre than the round-chamber section.

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Classic 140 × 25

Uncapped, square chamber

First-generation grade, shown in Walnut. Cost-led work with routine cleaning.

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The Timber Question, Answered Straight

You are selling into a country that produces excellent softwood and knows how to use it. Any distributor here will be asked why a customer should import a composite board instead, and an answer that runs down timber will lose the room. So here is the comparison as we would actually make it.

What timber does better

It is local, cheaper per square metre, and repairable. A tired timber deck can be sanded and re-oiled and look new; a composite board cannot. Timber is familiar to every installer in the country, needs no special clips, and its supply chain is about as short as a supply chain gets. If the customer enjoys the maintenance, or the budget is tight, timber is a perfectly good answer and we would rather you said so than lost the relationship over one job.

What composite does better

It does not need the annual treatment. That is the whole proposition, and in this market it is worth more than it looks, because the maintenance window is the same narrow window as everything else — the weekend that would have gone on oiling the deck is a weekend in a short summer. It will not splinter, which matters on anything barefoot or with children on it, and it does not need re-fixing as boards cup and twist. Over a fifteen-year horizon the comparison is about labour and weekends, not about the board.

Where composite genuinely needs more care than timber

Two places, and we would rather you heard them from us. It moves more along its length than timber does, so the expansion gaps in the installation guide are not advisory — a timber-trained joiner will under-gap it. And colour is per batch, so a board replaced in year four will not match, where a timber board weathers in. Both are handled by planning rather than by product choice, and both are cheap to get right and expensive to discover late.

What the Board Is Made Of, and How It Reads in Northern Light

Straight from our own catalogue, with nothing rounded up.

60% wood powder, 30% HDPE, 10% additives

That is the whole recipe, and we would rather publish the additive share than print two numbers that do not add up to a hundred. On the capped range a co-extruded shield wraps a WPC core, and the shield is the wearing layer — it carries the fade and scratch resistance, and it is what a steel-edged snow shovel damages. The material can be recycled and reused at end of life, and we hold ISO 14001 alongside ISO 9001; both certificate numbers are in the table further down for anyone whose procurement asks.

Low sun shows everything — choose the texture accordingly

For much of the Swedish year the sun sits low, and raking light is unforgiving — it rakes across a surface and picks out every scratch, every ripple in the substructure and every mark. Two practical consequences: a deeper texture hides wear better than a smooth one under that light, and a substructure that is slightly out of level will show as a shadow line even when the deck is sound. Get the frame flat and choose the grain with the light in mind; ask for samples and look at them outdoors in the evening rather than under a showroom lamp.

Sections and textures

ZSGJ138H23A and ZSGJ138H23C at 138 × 23 mm, ZSGJ138H25 at 138 × 25, ZSGJ140S23 at 140 × 23, ZSGJ140S25 at 140 × 25, ZSGJ145S30 at 145 × 30. Capped surfaces run H1 straight grain and H2, H3 and H5 wood grain; the classic range uses its own codes, so quote the texture with the range. Full schedule with metre weights on the model page.

Colours — Three Ranges

Colour and texture are specified separately from the profile, so a complete specification is three things: model, texture code, colour.

The full colour card

Capped co-extrusion: Teak, Antique, Redwood, IPE, Light-grey, Walnut.
Classic uncapped: Teak, Redwood, Walnut, Coffee, Chocolate, Ebony.
3D embossing: Teak, Red Wood, Walnut, Chocolate, Light Grey, Dark Grey.

Grey is available in the capped co-extrusion range (Antique, Light-grey) and in the 3D embossing range (Light Grey, Dark Grey) — worth knowing early, because a grey brief is a capped or 3D embossed job and should be priced on that basis from the first conversation.

Judge the sample outdoors, in this light

A swatch is an indication, not a match, and northern light makes that worse rather than better: the same board reads warmer under a showroom lamp than it does under an overcast Swedish sky. Ask for physical samples in the two or three you have shortlisted — free, you cover the courier, credited in full against your first order — and look at them outside, at the time of day the deck will actually be used.

Installation and Accessories

From our own installation guide. Put these figures on the drawing before the frame goes down — and in this market, before the ground freezes.

The gaps, and the double joist

5–7 mm between the sides of adjacent boards. About 5 mm between a capped board and a wall. 3–5 mm at butt joints where two board ends meet. Butt joints sit on double joists — each board end gets its own joist, never a shared one, and this is the detail most often missed. Where boards are laid cold — which here means most of the building season — work to the upper end of every range, because the board will be at its shortest on the day it goes down.

Accessories, with sizes

Stainless steel start clip, plastic clip, expansion screw, L-shaped corner trim 50 × 50 × 3000 mm, WPC joist 40 × 30 × 3000 mm, aluminium joist 40 × 25 × 2900 mm. Note the aluminium joist is 2900 mm, not 3000 — an easy hundred millimetres to lose when you take off quantities. On the west coast and the archipelago, specify A4 / 316 stainless for clips and fixings rather than A2.

Ask About a Specific Profile

Send the section, the volume and the season

What Owning the Line Gives You

Capacity you can book against

Roughly 2,000 tonnes a month, about 100 containers. In a market where everyone needs stock in the same eight weeks, the thing that matters is that a repeat order does not queue behind somebody else's. Send the volume and the season; we answer with a slot, not a hope.

Dies are ours, so sections are ours

We own the moulds and cut them in-house. That is why the schedule runs past a hundred sections rather than a catalogue page — and why we can talk seriously about a market-specific profile.

A test report with every shipment

Goods are checked before despatch and the report travels with them. Routine, not negotiated — and it is what makes a warranty claim a paperwork exercise later instead of an argument.

Certification: What We Hold, and the Exact Scope

Swedish procurement verifies, so here is the whole picture including the exact scope — a certificate covering three profiles covers those three profiles. Ask and we send the document itself.

Get the Documents Themselves

Nothing above is a claim you have to take on trust. Tell us which documents your project needs and we will send the PDFs — certificate, Declaration of Performance with the reaction-to-fire class, the laboratory reports, the ISO certificates and the warranty schedule.

Request the certificates and test reports

What We Do for a Distributor

A first order can be well under a container

Minimum order is 70 m². In a short-season market that matters more than it does elsewhere — it lets a new distributor test a colour, a profile and our paperwork on one real job instead of betting a season on us.

Samples are free

You pay the courier and we credit it in full against your first order. Ask for a sawn sample: the cut end shows whether the cap runs all the way round the section or stops at the sides. And look at the samples outdoors in evening light before you decide — see the note on northern light above.

A real number within 24 hours

Send the specification and the volume, get a per-unit price rather than a range. We need: profile, colour, quantity in m², discharge port, and the season the stock is for.

Private label, market-specific sections, testing on your profile

All three are conversations. We own the tooling, we already run sections cut for particular export markets, and where a project needs a test our documents do not cover we will put your profile through the laboratory — fee up front, credited against the order. Every result we send you names the profile it was measured on.

Sweden: Route, Transit and Terms

Loading is Nansha or Yantian, both in Guangdong, both within trucking distance of the plant.

The Freeze Is the Easy Part — the Thaw Is the Test

Specific to Sweden, and deliberately different from our Polish page. Poland is about the width of the annual swing. Sweden is about how long the deck spends under snow and what happens in the weeks when it comes off.

Frozen solid is a stable condition; thawing is not

A deck under a metre of settled snow in February is in a fairly benign state — cold, dry, stable. The damage happens in the thaw, when meltwater runs into every gap and then refreezes overnight, night after night. Water that has somewhere to go is harmless. Water that has nowhere to go turns into ice and lifts a board. Composite does not take up water the way timber does, so the board is rarely what fails — the drainage is.

Which makes drainage the specification that matters most

Three things, all of them decided before the boards go down: fall on the substructure so meltwater leaves, board gaps kept clear at 5–7 mm so it can get through, and a perimeter that is not sealed tight, so the deck never becomes a tray. Set the gutter detail the installation guide calls for at the base. A deck built flat and closed in will survive one winter and complain about the second.

Snow load belongs to the frame, not the board

Settled snow on a raised deck is a structural question for whoever designs the substructure. Give them the metre weight for the profile you are buying and let them do the arithmetic — it is on the model page, and it runs from 2.00 to 7.27 kg/m across the schedule, so it is not a number to guess at. We put the figure for your profile in writing with the quotation.

Clearing it: plastic blade, push rather than chop

This is the complaint that comes back to you rather than to us. A steel-edged shovel dragged across a composite deck scratches the shield, and on a capped board the shield is the wearing layer. Say it at the point of sale: plastic blade, push rather than chop, and leave the last few millimetres to melt. It costs nothing to mention and it is expensive to argue about in April.

Salt and grit attack the fixings, not the boards

De-icing salt tracked onto a terrace concentrates as the water dries. The composite handles it. Screws, clips, joist hangers and post bases do not — and that is exactly where nobody looks until the deck has to come up. Specify the fixing grade at quotation rather than leaving it to site, and on the west coast or in the archipelago make it A4 / 316.

Jetties, Lakesides and Anywhere Wet Underfoot

Sweden has a great deal of water and a lot of decking ends up beside it, so the slip question comes up early. The useful answer is about method rather than adjectives.

What our result is

R10 under AS 4586-2013 Appendix D, ramp method at 15 degrees, Intertek report 230625005SHF-001, measured on profile ZSGJ138H23A. That is the shod wet method — the number that describes a surface walked in shoes, which is most of the Swedish year. It belongs to that profile and that method, and we will send the report so your own technician reads the scope on its face.

Barefoot wet areas use a different method and a different scale

A jetty in July is a barefoot surface, and barefoot wet areas are assessed by a separate method against its own classification — a figure from one does not convert into the other. Establish which one your project or your client's insurer is asking for, then ask us for the report that matches it. Bring us the requirement and we answer it with a document rather than an adjective.

Three Things That Go Wrong When Europeans Import WPC

Not sales copy — these are the three that cost distributors money.

The frame is set out for timber

Especially likely here, where every installer has spent a career on timber. Composite has a maximum support spacing and it is tighter than timber. Get the figure for your profile in writing and put it on the drawing before the frame goes down. Wrong, and the deck does not collapse — it flexes underfoot permanently, and under low raking light the deflection shows as a shadow line long before anyone feels it.

The end gap gets left out

The most expensive of the three, because a buckled deck is a full relay with no partial fix. And it is more likely here than almost anywhere, because boards laid on a cold day are at their shortest — a gap that looks generous in May is the minimum in August. Work to the upper end of the range.

Batch colour is not matched later

Pigment goes into the extrusion, so two runs of the same colour will not be identical. Buy the season in one batch and keep the buffer. A board replaced in year four will not match — ours or anybody else's — and this is the one place where timber genuinely behaves better, since a replacement plank weathers in.

Warranty, and How a Claim Works

Stepped, not flat

Capped co-extrusion carries 15 years, classic uncapped 10. Both step down by year rather than paying full value throughout: 100% of the value of the affected goods in years 1–3, then 80, 70, 50 and 40% through years 4 to 7, then reducing in bands to 10% in the final years. It covers peeling, cracking and overall uneven fading.

It starts at the destination port

Cover runs from the date the goods arrive and are signed for at the port — not our factory gate, and not the day your customer installs them. In a market where stock often lands a season before it is laid, that difference is worth reading twice, and it works in the distributor's favour.

Certificates are per batch

The schedule that applies is the one on that batch's certificate, which is why the test report shipping with the goods matters. Keep it with the commercial paperwork. If a supplier quotes you a flat 25 years, ask for the schedule — the answer tells you more than the number.

Talk to Us About Sweden

The full enquiry, if you would rather send everything at once. Tell us which season the stock is for — it is the single most useful thing in the message. You will hear back within 24 hours with a real per-unit price.

Distributor and project enquiry

Sweden: Common Questions