RECYCLING AND REUSE – WHAT’S NEXT FOR COMPOSITES?

RECYCLING AND REUSE – WHAT’S NEXT FOR COMPOSITES??

A large audience gathered for the JEC World 2022 round-table discussion Design for Circular Composite Products: Turning Waste, Recycling & Reuse into Opportunities, looking to learn about the latest developments in this area. Session moderator Malcolm Forsyth, Sustainability Manager for the Composites UK trade association, started out by asking the five members of the panel, all players in the composites recycling sector, about the biggest opportunities and challenges they face today.??

The right applications?

Frazer Barnes is Chairman & CTO of Gen2Carbon, a UK company recycling carbon fibre into technical textile products that are mainly used in the composites industry.??

“I think one of the biggest opportunities in front of us in terms of carbon fibre recycling is making use of recycled carbon fibre materials in applications which use their functional properties. By that I mean their properties beyond their mechanical performance. As we see the trend towards decarbonisation, there are many areas where carbon fibre today is used for its functional performance in clean energy applications.”???

“I think our challenge is creating the awareness of the right applications in which to use recycled carbon fibres. We shouldn't be trying to force fit them into applications. We should be using them where they’re the right choice, the right solution, for a particular need. I think it's getting that awareness across the industry, that's the key challenge for us today.”?

Think out of the box?

Giorgio Betteto is R&D CTO at Italian company Gees Recycling, which specialises in mechanical recycling and repurposing of composites waste into new products.??

“The biggest opportunity, particularly in this moment, is to reuse and recycle and obtain a product that may enlarge the composite use. Because when you are using a composite, any kind of composite, you already have something that cuts the emissions. Any kind of product in composite will last longer and require less maintenance respect to any alternative. This alone is a big advantage. With the technologies that we are developing it is possible to enlarge application to even a low-tech application.”?

“The biggest challenge is to convince people to think out of the box. Don’t say ‘we have always done it this way.’ Recycled products may be cheaper, better than alternatives that are not composite.”?

We have the technology?

Pirjo Pietik?inen runs the Composites Group at the Finnish Plastics Industries Federation, which is studying the utilisation of composites waste in cement kiln co-processing.??

“Firstly, I see the opportunities because we already have the technology, it exists and it's running. And it has been demonstrated to be very good in the way that 100% of the composite waste is used in that process, part of it as energy and the other as a raw material in the cement kiln.”?

“Speaking about the challenges, I think one of the biggest ones is how to organise the logistics. The composite waste has to be sorted in plant, then transported to some place – in Finland they are gathered in one place because there is only one factory that shreds the material – then it has to be transported into the cement kiln factory. And, as you might imagine, all the transportation means some costs and maybe companies don't like them so much.”??

Scale is an issue?

Cement co-processing is also a route being developed in the US. Dan Coughlin is VP, Composites Market Development for the American Composites Manufacturers Association (ACMA), and Leader of Industrial Collaborations at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.??

“As you might be aware wind blades form the core material to get that system up and running. There's roughly 70,000 tons of wind blades that are being repowered in the United States. But even though that sounds like a lot, it's actually very small compared to cement production. Scale is an issue. Composites as an industry is fairly small compared to other industries and so we face a similar problem as Finland in that the supply chain’s a big challenge. But the good news is the composites that are out there, that are not yet being recycled, have a much higher biogenic content, which does help the cement industry which is roughly 8% of global CO2 emissions for industry. So, in terms of the opportunity that's out there, there's a lot more composites that can be recycled.”??

“But the cement kiln should be seen as a backstop and not the best or first solution for reusing composites. There should be reuse, there should be repurposing, remanufacturing, other forms of capturing value before you get to the cement kiln process.”?

Why aren’t you using it as well??

Finally, Jen Hill, Director of B&M Longworth (Edgworth), explained that the UK-based SME is developing a ‘next generation’ recycling technology for the composites industry allowing the reclamation of fibres and resins, and went on to pose a question for the audience.??

“For the entire industry, the opportunity is the exciting one, that carbon fibre has historically been high cost, short supply, very much in demand. We can now potentially, very realistically, reuse every carbon fibre manufactured multiple times before it ends up getting to the end of its life. I think the challenges with that is, as an industry quite rightly everybody wants to recycle rather than waste –everybody in the room would say they'd rather not send anything to waste – but where do you expect that recyclate to be used if you won't do it within your own businesses? If you're creating very low cost, very high performance material, why aren't you using it as well? So that's the main challenge for new technologies to break through.”?

Forsyth continued the discussion by asking what the panel members thought could increase the rate of composites recycling and use of recyclate, and what role governments could play in this. Listen to their answers, as well as questions from the audience, on JEC WebTV.??

Watch the video: https://www.jeccomposites.tv/events/78f111ad50.html ?

And don’t forget to add your comments to this post. Let’s keep sharing …?