I saw an article in Composites World this week about Toray’s Pacific Northwest facility in Tacoma, Washington and a company in Gardena, California called Elevated Materials that have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for Elevated Materials to upcycle all of the carbon fiber waste produced by Toray Tacoma into repurposed carbon fiber products. Of course, Toray’s Tacoma facility handles Boeing and all of the lower tier suppliers to the entire Seattle area Boeing operation, as well as the marine and sporting goods markets on the West Coast of the US.
Composites World 7/18/2024
Since its founding, Elevated Materials has recycled (or upcycled as they call it) 200,000 pounds of carbon fiber waste. While globally that is merely a drop in the bucket, that is actually quite a bit of carbon fiber that has been recycled since Elevated Materials opened its doors in 2017. And now with this MOU with Toray, Elevated Materials is set to expand very quickly.
This story got me to looking at this market, and since that’s about where I am in the drafting of my next book, I was already doing some research into who is recycling carbon fiber composites and marketing the reclaimed carbon fiber into new product streams. And also, how they were doing the recycling and how much of the original properties of the carbon fiber were left in their reclaimed fiber. It turns out that the news here is better than I had thought it to be. And it is only going to get better in the future.
I wrote a bit about this subject in this newsletter a few months back mostly focused on recycling of carbon fiber sporting goods. This is of course somewhat of a niche market since the total tonnage of what are called “advanced” carbon fiber composites in the sporting goods industry is small in comparison even to one Boeing 787 or Airbus A350, or even one large wind turbine blade. I have also talked about the future of carbon fiber composites and their application both to the air transport industry and to the wind energy business – especially for the large offshore turbines being installed in Europe.
What I found is that there is a lot going on, largely in Europe and largely driven by new environmental and sustainability laws now on the books in the EU. While there is activity ongoing in the US, as evidenced by the Boeing / Elevated Materials MOU, the EU has had this sort of thing ongoing for a few years now. France could be the most aggressive in this regard – they have a regulation in place called the Anti-Waste for a Circular Economy Act (AGEC using the original French) that is targeted at aging composites, primarily in the recreational boat area, but it is very broad and covers carbon composites and the wind turbine industry offshore of France. This of course drives the rest of the nations in the EU in the same direction much as the California air quality regulations in the 1970’s cut tail pipe emissions not only in California but across the US.
Here in the US, there is a company in Lake City, South Carolina called Materials Innovation Technologies that got started with an SBIR grant. They developed a process for reclaiming carbon fiber from nearly any source of waste carbon fiber composite. They have even created a Division that they call MIT-RTF which they recently renamed Carbon Conversions. Using the SBIR funding and other investments they have been able to convert waste carbon composites to usable products using a process that they have named 3-DEP™ that accepts waste chopped carbon fiber composites and removes the resin, leaving a product with differing lengths of reclaimed carbon fiber. They recently got funding from Boeing after they demonstrated the reclamation of carbon fiber from an F-18 aircraft and used it to make parts for a corvette. And they took a somewhat different approach than some other recycling companies in that they focused on developing the process using SBIR funding, then built out the overall supply chain before they got funding to apply their proprietary process to “reclaim” the carbon fiber. While they don’t reveal on their website how they do it, they claim to retain 95-97% of the properties of virgin carbon fiber, albeit in a chopped product.
And there are larger players yet that are dipping their toes into this market. Mitsubishi Chemical Group for instance has an ongoing business of reclaiming and recycling carbon fiber from scrap composites. Their process is a fairly straightforward pyrolysis, so their end product has lessened mechanical properties from the virgin fiber, but it is still a very useful product. Their process – carboNXT – produces a wide variety of different product forms which they either sell as raw material or incorporate the chopped or milled fiber into things like a carbon fiber – thermoplastic composite prepreg, carbon fleece, carbon fiber paper, and some molding compounds ready to use in things like the automotive marketplace. They claim a 20-40% cost savings over virgin fiber and offer a variety of different products as well. This is a somewhat different business model than Carbon Conversions, but it is one that has been proven to work in this industry.
Another company of interest is Fairmat, based in Paris and with offices in the Brittany region of Western France, Seville, Spain, and in Salt Lake City here in the US. These folks offer a cradle to grave service. They will recycle your material for you and give you back the carbon fiber for a fee, or accept it for recycling with the intent to make the carbon fiber into new useful products that they can sell. These folks were a startup in 2020 that raised $35M in November 2022 to build out their carbon fiber recycling business specifically focused on turning that waste carbon fiber into new and useful products. And in May of this year, At the SAMPE conference where I gave a talk about sustainability, Fairmat and Hexcel announced a 10 year agreement to recycle carbon fiber composites from Hexcel’s operations in Salt Lake City. Fairmat had recently opened their 15,000 square foot recycling center very near the Hexcel site in Salt Lake, so it is pretty easy to assume that discussions had been ongoing between these two companies for some time before they made the announcement.
A fairly new US company to also watch is Shocker Composites in Wichita, Kansas that was
formed by a Ph.D. student at Wichita State - Vamsidhar Patlolla. He has developed a solvolysis process that dissolves the resin rather than burning it out of the carbon fiber as is done using pyrolysis. This company’s product retains sufficient properties of the virgin carbon fiber that it can be called “aerospace grade”. And the process that Dr. Patlolla came up with is profitable as well because the end product is high value carbon fiber, and the process itself is fairly inexpensive. And they took this process a couple of steps further. Once they had the carbon fiber removed from the resin, they discovered that it was too “fluffy” to easily remake it into new product forms. So, they worked with a company called R&M International, an import/export company specializing in plastics and recycling materials to develop a process that compresses their nearly pure chopped carbon fiber into pellet form so that it can be used directly in a thermoplastic injection molding process or over molding process ready for use in a high production rate, high performance molded product. This product is almost identical in mechanical properties to virgin carbon fiber made into this pellet form (with a plastic like ABS) at a much reduced cost because the carbon fiber is effectively free of charge since it was intended for a landfill anyway. And, their process is entirely in-line. From the initial solvolysis and removal of the resin to the densification of the fiber into pellets and creation of a pellet ready to be used in large format 3D printing or any of the rapid injection type manufacturing processes for thermoplastic composite parts.
This partnership was developed in 2018, and has to date been quite successful. Now these two companies are developing new longer length fiber pellets up to about 1” in fiber length for even higher end composite parts. It has been shown that once you reach about this length in a discontinuous carbon fiber product you can make something that has nearly identical mechanical properties as virgin continuous carbon fiber. This was demonstrated back in 2014 using stretch broken carbon fiber. Shocker and R&M are building on that prior knowledge to develop raw materials for applications that traditionally required continuous fiber.
There are a few more companies that are also in this business that are finally starting to see some success, so this entire business is growing and will grow rapidly as more and more of the scrap and carbon fiber waste becomes available to them to recycle and reuse at a profit. And just a hint, I am devoting quite a bit of space to this in my new book because this story needs to be told to the general public before the public starts to take notice of the carbon footprint of the industry.
That’s about it for this week. I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. As usual I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – as well as 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.
Finally, 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, except that I charge $8 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’s a picture of the book.
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