Circularity Challenges and Opportunities for the Composites Recycling and Reuse Business

#composites, #sustainability, #recycling, #reuse, #recycledfiber, #recycledresin

This post is the fourth in the series that introduces the ideas spelled out in my second book, just released – “Sustainable Composite Materials: A Roadmap to a Circular Economy”.  In the first three posts I talked about sustainability and circularity in the raw materials supply chain, reducing the carbon footprint in the making of both fiber and resin, and reducing the carbon footprint in the processing and manufacture of composites.  For this post, I’m going to talk a little bit about what to do with composites at the end of their useful life and what the recycling and reuse business is doing and still needs to do to get us to a circular economy.

While the lead graphic in this post is about circularity in biocomposites, it does demonstrate pretty well what I want to talk about in this post.  To begin this discussion we need to first highlight the current state of affairs in recycling and reuse of composite material parts and systems in order to understand the magnitude of the problem as well as the complexity of the problem. 

First, the magnitude of the problem that recyclers face in dealing with the mountains of used composite parts is somewhat overwhelming when thought of in terms of what the global demand is for a recycling solution.  The best examples of this are the wind energy industry and the recreational marine industry.  I have written about this in the past, but the current projections for how much waste material just the wind turbine industry will generate with end of life wind turbine blades has been estimated to be as much as 43 million tons per year by 2050 (1).  The problem is that this waste is not just one composite material because of the designs of the larger wind turbine blades and the requirement for longer, stiffer blades. 

Used Wind Turbine Blades in Sweetwater, Texas (courtesy Texas Monthly)

Modern wind turbine blades for the larger, more efficient turbines of today, have a carbon fiber spar down the center of the blade with a glass fiber airfoil surface.  All of this is bonded together to make the blades, so when they come to the end of their life (about 20 years) what you have is a blend of glass fiber and carbon fiber composite. 

Historically, the majority of the recycling efforts have gone into chopping or grinding up the blades and using the ground up composite for things like concrete reinforcement.  Unfortunately, this takes care of only a small fraction of the total problem, since the bulk of the used blades, at least to date, are merely landfilled.  That is, however, going to be a thing of the past in the not too distant future in the US, and is already a thing of the past in Europe.  Since the passage of the “Green New Deal” legislation in the EU, landfilling of used wind turbine blades and old fiberglass recreational boat hulls has ended in Europe.  And there is also significant movement in the US to severely restrict the landfilling of used wind turbine blades, mostly at the state and community level where there are lots of used wind turbine blades stacking up.  This is true in Texas, Wyoming, and Ohio where the bulk of the onshore wind capacity exists.  While there are no state-wide regulations banning landfilling of used wind turbine blades, there is a tremendous on the ground NIMBY movement that is providing a practical restriction in several areas.  Of course, since the US is considerably more litigious than Europe, the expectation is that this will only get more difficult as time goes on.

Now that we understand the challenges and the scale of the looming problem, what do we do about it?  That is a question that has many answers, some of which are actually being scaled up today.  There are two that I have highlighted in previous posts and that I also highlight in my book.  Both of these are from Europe, which makes sense because the European restrictions on landfilling composites was put into place in 2021.  This is the European Green Deal that provides a roadmap for Europe to become climate neutral by 2050.  Included in this of course is much more than just composites, but for the composites industry it ended the practice of landfilling used composite wind turbine blades and recreational boat hulls. 

Since the passing of that act and adoption of the legally binding legislation, there have been two notable developments in the recycling industry, both of which are being scaled up and both of which have tremendous potential to show the rest of the world how it needs to be done.  I have written about the two companies that have not only done demonstrations, they have developed industrial scale processes to manage the recycling process. 

Fiberloop and Composite Recycling Prototype Thermolysis Unit

The first solution I want to mention are the machines developed by Fiberloop and marketed by Composite Recycling that use a lower temperature pyrolysis-like process that they call thermolysis to melt the resin off of chopped used fiberglass pieces.  They have perfected this process to the point that what results is very clean, nearly virgin chopped glass fiber and a “thermolysis oil” that can easily be turned back into resin and reused.  These folks have fairly recently joined in a consortium with Beneteau, the French yacht builder along with several other companies including Owens Corning and some others to scale up this process to enable the recycling of used recreational and racing boat hulls.  In addition to this, Composite Recycling and Fiberloop are working with the major wind energy companies in Europe to enable recycling of wind turbine blades in the European offshore wind industry. 

Korec Fiberglass Recycling Process

The other European process that also involves heating up chopped fiberglass and extracting both glass and resin was developed by an Italian company by the name of Korec.  What they do is to heat up the chopped fiberglass in an atmosphere devoid of oxygen and at elevated pressure and then inject CO₂ into the heated chamber.  After about 3 to 4 hours, they remove and cool the gas from the chamber which results in an oily substance that is the remains of the resin and has properties very similar to the thermolysis oil from the Fiberloop / Composite Recycling process.  Korec has inked an agreement with Owens Corning as well to scale this process up to be able to handle the oncoming mountain of used fiberglass recreational boat hulls come to the end of their useful life. 

There are a couple of other efforts to mention here as well.  In a multi-year effort in the UK called PRoGrESS (Polymer Recycling of Glass Reinforced Epoxy – Sustainable Solutions) the technology to recycle glass / epoxy composites was developed and is being scaled up and marketed by Cubis Systems Limited.  In another development in France, Specific Polymers which is an R&D startup that is bridging the gap between academia and industry has developed not only a process for recycling organic matrix composites but also resins that meet most of the requirements of epoxies but are very easily decomposed chemically at the end of their useful life. 

So, what does all of this mean for the companies that are in the business of recycling composites at the end of their life?  What it means is that not only are there challenges yet to be overcome, there are also significant opportunities for enterprising companies to further develop their processes for removing the resin from the fiber and scale them up to the point where they can actually turn a profit by taking used fiberglass and carbon fiber composites and selling the separated fiber and the reconstituted resin back into the composites industry. 

The good news about this is that there is a tremendous pent up demand for recycled materials to be incorporated into automotive door panels, sports equipment, and other durable consumer goods.  This is because the general public is beginning to use the power of the purse to demand more “green” and sustainable products.

That’s about it for this week.  Next week I want to delve into more of the future of composites and the possibilities and promise that plant-derived composite precursors, natural fibers, and plant based resins afford the future of the composites industry.  That is the direction that this long time user of composites sees the industry going, especially as the price of oil keeps going up.  This has of course been exacerbated by the current geopolitical situation, but these sorts of crises seem to happen more often than not, so the future looks fairly bright for plants to take over from West Texas crude for the precursors of choice for our next generation of industrial plastics and composites. 

As always, I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them.  And I hope people who are interested find something they can use in their lives or at least some ideas that they might be able to put into practice.  At least I hope that these make people think a bit about sustainability and some of the major issues looming before us. 

I will post this first on my updated website – www.nedpatton.com – and then on LinkedIn.  And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms.  Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome.  I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives.  And that is especially true of the companies and research institutions that I mention in these posts.  The more we communicate the message the better we will be able to effect the changes in the industry that are needed. 

My second book, which was officially released on April 6, is a roadmap to a circular and sustainable business model for the industry which I hope that at least at some level the industry will follow.  Only time will tell.  Maybe it will get noticed – as always that is just a crap shoot.  As far as schedule is concerned, I received my author copies last week, so the second pic is the cover of the actual book.  I’ve included a picture of the cover at the end of this post.  Let me know whether or not you like the cover.  Hopefully people will like it enough and will be interested enough in composites sustainability that they will buy it.  And of course I hope that they read it and get engaged.  We need all the help we can get. 

Last but not least, I still need to plug my first book.  “The String and Glue of our World” pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element.  The book was published and made available August of 2023 and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher.  However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. 

So, I will send you a signed copy of either or both books for the same price you would get charged on Amazon for an unsigned one, except that I have to charge for shipping.  Just go to the link to the product page on my website (https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page) and order either book.    And as usual, here are pictures of the covers of both books.