Some Thoughts about Sustainability I’ve Been Pondering
Welcome back – and I’m actually very happy I can say that. While everything isn’t perfect yet, I am seeing progress back to my old crochety self every day. And, I have been pondering a few subjects in composites sustainability in the last several weeks, as well as having read a few things. So, I thought I would start with some rather far out stuff and work my way back to the present.
This is a plant in Nova Scotia that recently underwent a $1.2 million expansion to create a 10,000 litre (sorry EU spelling – I mean they came up with the measure so we should probably go with it) precision fermentation line. This particular line is just another example of the precision fermentation installations that are high capacity that have sprung up in the EU and in the US fairly recently.
What does this have to do with composites you ask. Well, there is an effort afoot that I talked about a while back to make palm oil using precision fermentation. While this started in the food industry because palm oil is a one of the most widely used oils in a lot of snack and other foods, what some have done is to turn palm oil into an epoxy resin that has similar properties to bisphenol-A or more likely bisphenol-F which can be plant-derived.
The process starts like this. First, take ag waste and do a precision fermentation to make palmitic acid – the major ingredient in palm oil.
Then once you have palmitic acid, it is not that difficult to convert it into a useful epoxy resin that can be used just like the petroleum based resins that we are familiar with. Of course, the processing parameters are somewhat different, but that is true of every epoxy blend that we use – from room temperature to 350F curing epoxies and from fairly thin and almost watery to very thick. The palm oil derived epoxy fits well with normal industrial processes for epoxy.
This pic from Research Gate tells pretty much the rest of the story. This is from February 2023, so people are already beginning to try to commercialize this stuff. That makes it a very sustainable pathway to creating high tonnage epoxies from something that is traditionally land filled and for which we have an overabundance – ag and forest products waste.
I have of course talked about this quite a bit, but what comes from this large amount of ag and forest products waste is a stream of fiber (cellulose), lignin which is resinous, hemicellulose which can go either direction, and a lot of other stuff. Removing first the fiber and then using precision fermentation on what is left seems to me to be a completely sustainable method for the industrial precision fermentation and organic chemistry that we will need for the future as we get off of the petroleum dole.
Now let’s go to the other end of the spectrum in sustainability – recycling and reuse. There is actually quite a bit going on in this world and I missed over the summer. Fortunately, from what I can gather from going over the missed issues of Composites world from the last month and a half, lots has happened and is happening in composites sustainability. I’m going to start off with a pic from a French sailboat.
This boat which uses a thermoplastic hydrofoil that is 10% recycled material. This boat is owned by MiniLab which is a consortium launched in 2023 with Avel Robotics, ComposiTEC, OpenSea Labs, IRMA, Diab, and Victrex, all of which are well known names in thermoplastic composites, composite recycling, recycled material processing, and high end sailing design. So, this is a very good example of recycled material making it into high end, high performance, extremely light weight and highly loaded racing structure successfully and making something that can win a race.
Of course, and I have said this repeatedly, the Europeans are far ahead of where we are in the US with their regulatory and sustainability regime. One example of this is that a company in Barcelona Spain, RCA Engineering, has developed a six gate bankability framework for recycled composite materials of all types in order to make final investment decisions. This is the final decision that needs to be made before something actually goes commercial. The fact that RCA is actually starting this is very timely, as I have written. Just the aging wind turbine blade composites market is going to have to deal with over a million tons of material by 2030 – that is only 4 years away. And we have the aging commercial aircraft population to deal with as well as sporting goods, racing sailboats, recreational marine composites (old boats), and a myriad of other composites of all stripes that will need to be recycled and reused in new products. It’s about time the industry had such a framework that it can go through to make these final investment decisions to build out the infrastructure needed to address this problem. One example is in the article which is something that Composite Recycling and Fiberloop have commercialized is the thermal breakdown of aged out wind turbine blades into glass fiber and a “thermolysis oil” product that can be directly converted into new resin for use in new wind turbine blades.
The recovery routes outlined in this Six-Step process are most of the traditional methods, mechanical or grinding and pyrolysis where you burn off the resin and produce lower quality fiber and does not actually work for glass. However, the new process also adds in thermal the lower temperature thermolysis process of Composite Recycling and Fiberloop, fluidized bed processes, and microwave processing. Then comes solvolysis and the chemical means of stripping resin from fiber and retaining both, and finally gasification and cement co-processing for the matter that is left over after all of the other processes. The fortunate thing about this new six-step process is that all of this is outlined within the auspices of the new Spanish Six-Step Process.
So, that’s it for this week’s post. At least my medical event left me nearly unscathed. A really good (plant based, nutrition forward – nutritarian diet) and lifelong exercise left me less vulnerable to the debilitating effects of my event. As, I’m back to being the irascible engineer focused on spreading the word about the carbon footprint of the composites industry. Fortunately from where I sit it appears that the industry has waken up to their problem.
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 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. 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.
Both books are 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.
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