New Process(es) for Continuous Recycling of Glass Fiber Composites
- Ned Patton
- May 12
- 6 min read
I have talked quite a bit in this newsletter about companies that have developed processes and equipment for recycling end of life fiberglass composites. Composite Recycling of Ecublens, Switzerland is probably the best example of this with their processing machines that fit in a 40’ ISO container, as well as larger systems that are more suited to fixed, industrial size locations.
These processes are wonderful and actually are very well suited to placing at sites like Sweetwater, Texas where the mountain of used wind turbine blades still sit out in the open on the ground. And they were the first to develop and market a breakthrough technology in the recycling of used wind turbine blades and other fiberglass and composite structures at the end of their useful life, while reclaiming both usable fiber and usable resin.
They are, however, still batch processes where the machines work on a single batch at a time.
So I found what I saw in one of my news feeds this week rather interesting. A UK project called PRoGrESS has completed the development of their industrial scale continuous fiberglass recycling process. They apparently use a fluidized bed approach to remove the resin from the chopped up fiberglass pieces rather than the batch thermolysis approach that Composite Recycling uses. And, while they have focused on the recycled glass fiber, apparently one of the partners in this UK project, Cubis Systems, reports that they also recover at least some useful resin materials as well.
It is apparent from the graphic presented in the final report for this project that the process that was developed in the PRoGrESS project chops up the fiberglass into smaller pieces than the Composite Recycling process uses in their batch-style thermolysis process. This is most probably because of their fluidized bed approach where to get complete separation of the resins from the fibers, the pieces of fiberglass need to be smaller than what can be achieved using a batch thermolysis approach. As you can see from the graphic below that describes their process in pictures, the “reduced” feedstock that came from the used wind turbine blades is rather small.
From the news article about it, they focused on the use of the recycled glass fiber in the construction industry, where the short, chopped fiber is mixed with things like thermoplastics and concrete as a reinforcement. It is probable that their short, chopped fiber would be a very good feedstock for fiberglass rebar for light weight reinforcement of concrete. Fiberglass rebar is one of the fastest growing sectors in the glass fiber industry because as skyscrapers get taller, the self-weight of the concrete that is used to build them becomes a real problem, especially in earthquake prone areas.
The other major difference between this project and most of the other fiberglass recycling endeavors is that it was developed entirely under UK government funding. The Composite Recycling / Fiberloop process was developed jointly with a good bit of EU funding but also with investment from several companies that created their own intellectual property from the development.
The initial process was developed at the University of Strathclyde in the UK in collaboration with a consortium of companies, universities, and Institutes. It was led by Composites UK, the trade association for the UK composites industry that is the UK equivalent of the ACMA (American Composites Manufacturers Association) here in the US.
This £2M, 3 year project was able to demonstrate at pilot scale a completely continuous, fluidized bed fiberglass recycling process that started with used wind turbine blades and resulted in clean, chopped glass fiber as well as some reusable resin components.
As part of this project, they also focused on the downstream products that could be produced from these recycled wind turbine blades using the recycled short, chopped glass fibers. The commercialization efforts were primarily focused on the construction industry since the demand for this fiber form is fairly high in that industry, and the recycled glass fiber can be priced more competitively than virgin glass fiber.
The project was also focused on the economics and environmental benefits of the process to ensure that at the end of the project there would be a demonstrated and proven technology that had an established market making it ripe for further investment by companies wanting to get into this business. This last bit is evidence that the UK government and Composites UK made the right choices when they established Project PRoGrESS.
Further evidence in this is the fact that two of the partners in this collaboration, Cubis Systems and the University of Strathclyde, are going to collaborate on the development of an intermediate scale plant to optimize and completely validate the process and the recycled products that result from it.
Together with the consortium that includes Beneteau, Composite Recycling, and many other companies in the EU, this represents the rest of Europe having made the investments and developed the technologies at a scale representative of the size of the looming used wind turbine blade waste stream to recycle these used fiberglass blades into materials that are useful in making new composites.
All of these efforts in Europe focused on the markets for their products as were developing the technologies they developed to recycle used fiberglass. This has been the major hurdle with previous means of recycling the wind turbine blades because the ground up fiberglass that resulted from the previous efforts did not have a ready high value sales chain. Without a ready market to buy these materials there is little incentive for companies to invest the millions of dollars required to develop and prove out their technology.
Here in the US, partly because of a lack of funding or stated interest at the national level (US politics is what it is), and the perception here that there is no market for the recycled materials, we are still at the beginning stages of development and commercialization of industrial scale processes for recycling used wind turbine blades. While there are ongoing efforts to do so, including GE renewables working with Veolia North America to grind up used wind turbine blades for use in concrete; REGEN fiber doing much the same thing; Carbon Rivers using pyrolysis to reclaim the glass fiber from used wind turbine blades without saving the resin; and the University of Amherst and BASF working on using supercritical CO2 to dissolve the resin from the fiber, none yet have reached the scale of the UK and EU efforts. I have talked about some of these efforts in previous posts, and while I don’t want it to appear that I am slighting the efforts ongoing in the US, we are still behind the EU and UK in our progress toward solving this mounting problem.
It would be good for the US to catch up and Congress to take on this challenge and fund programs in the US like the UK PRoGrESS Project and the EU recycling initiatives that helped companies like Fiberloop and Composite Recycling develop and market their technology. The mountain of wind turbine blades in Sweetwater, Texas is evidence that we need to get this ball rolling in the right direction.
That’s about it for this week. As always, I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. I will post this first on my 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 should be out in the fall, 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. Since my publisher and I have finally come to agreement about the title for my next book, our daughter has been kind enough to put together a draft of the cover of the book for my publisher to use to come up with a final version. So, I’ve included the approved cover at the end of this post as promised. 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, so here’s the plug. The book 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 last August 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. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon for an unsigned one, except that I have to charge for shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here are pictures of the covers of both books.
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