My last few posts about sustainability and recycling of composites have apparently raised the interest of some folks in this industry that are building their companies around what I have been writing about.
The Ultimate Goal for Composites Sustainability
I’ve gotten feedback and comments from a few of them, so I thought this week I would highlight some of the companies themselves and what they are doing in this arena. This includes recycling of old boats and wind turbine blades, companies that have processes that can extract the resin from both carbon fiber / epoxy composites and fiberglass and reuse both fiber and resin, and companies that have non-petroleum based (plant based mostly) resins for both of these major sectors of the industry, and that are building up their production capacity to compete with the big dogs in these markets.
Let’s start this discussion with companies that basically chop up (or mill as it is sometimes called) fiberglass boat hulls and old wind turbine blades and use the resulting chopped fiberglass for things like concrete reinforcement. There is a company in Spain, Conenor, that has developed processes that take used wind turbine blades, cut them up and crush the results, and mixes them with either thermoset or thermoplastic materials. The thermoset chopped fiberglass composite they make into structural panels for the construction industry, and the thermoplastic material is a raw material for new products like moldings and even extruded product that can be made into a lot of different things, including infrastructure parts like bridge beams and uprights.
Another company in Poland, Anmet, specializes in recycling old wind turbine blades and converting them into things like bridge abutments. In ANmet’s case what they do is to take the entire wind turbine blade, cut out a section, and bury both ends into concrete blocks. These then get placed at the ends of large bridges and are used to tie in the cables that hold up the bridge. These are lighter and much less expensive than the typical poured in place bridge abutments that hold up bridges like the Golden Gate.
In Italy, Gees Recycling has been chopping up old fiberglass boats, wind turbine blades, and basically anything made out of fiberglass that is no longer useful for several years at this point. They use the chopped fiberglass as a reinforcement in new products. Their main markets are plastic furniture, decorative and structural wall panels, and other primarily building and housing industry products. They pride themselves on their attention to aesthetics in their product line as well as the fact that quite a bit of what they have is Italian hand-crafted.
Here in the US, a consortium of a startup named ST Bungalow LLC (Garrison, New York) and architectural firm Molinelli Architects (Briarcliff Manor, New York), partnered with Oak Ridge National Lab and the University of Maine to develop what they call ConTech stay in place formwork to replace rebar in reinforced concrete floors, ceilings, and bridge decks. This stuff is lighter weight than steel rebar, the decking uses less concrete to get the same stiffness, and it will not corrode so the inspection and maintenance intervals can be much longer than with steel rebar.
ConTech Stay In Place Formwork Made From Recycled Fiberglass
Finally, a company based in Kirkland, Washington (Seattle area), Global Fiberglass Solutions, is able to take large scale fiberglass structures like large boat hulls and especially wind turbine blades, and chop them up into smaller pieces that they can then sell into markets that can use their recycled fiberglass. I have written about them in the past, and these are the folks that are supposed to be recycling the wind turbine blades that have piled up in Sweetwater, Texas, pictures of which have ended up in several of my posts. The jury is apparently still out over these folks, and GE who owns the blades in Texas has sued them for breach of contract since they haven’t yet started recycling the wind turbine blades they were contracted to get rid of in Sweetwater.
Now for the companies that can extract the resin from fiberglass and end up with an oily substance that can be converted into a composite resin and reused. Composite Recycling in Switzerland I have written about a couple of times. These folks have of course figured out how to remove the resin from all fiberglass composites. They use a lower temperature pyrolysis process (called thermolysis) that does not burn out the resin but instead de-polymerizes it into what they call “pyrolysis oil” which is just like it sounds and is ready to be reused in an new batch of composite resin.
Another company in the US, Eastman (yes, the film people) have a process they call “molecular recycling” which apparently breaks down the cross-linked resin into smaller molecular components that can be either dissolved or washed off of the fibers. I have talked a bit about their “mass balance” approach to certifying themselves as a completely sustainable business, which is admirable for as large a chemical company as Eastman is.
A company in Denmark, Vestas, has teamed up with Olin (yes, the Winchester folks), the Danish Technological Institute and Aarhus University, along with Stena Recycling to come up with an entirely chemical process to break down the epoxy resin in wind turbine blades. This process recovers almost all of the resin and enables it for reuse along with the fiber. They are just now starting to scale this process up to the point where it can manage not only blades that are coming off of aging turbines, they are also targeting those that are already removed and ready to be buried in a landfill. This development was part of the CETEC (Circular Economy for Thermosets Epoxy Composites) Initiative.
And in the carbon fiber composite space, in the US, there is Carbon Conversions of Lake City, South Carolina, which I have also written about. These folks have developed a process to separate the resin from the fiber for nearly any carbon fiber composite. Their input is scrap from the composite manufacturing process and they source it from all of the major carbon fiber composites manufacturing companies, primarily in the aerospace market. Wherever carbon fiber/epoxy prepreg is used, there is always a lot of waste in the cutting process for hand or machine layup. Since prepreg comes on long rolls, and each layer of a part is cut from the roll, there is quite a bit of scrap. This, as I have mentioned before, is the same thing as when you buy a bolt of fabric and make a shirt or dress out of it, you end up with cut off pieces of material. Carbon Conversions takes that scrap and repurposes the carbon fiber sustainably by dissolving the resin out of the fiber and leaving the chopped fiber intact and at nearly the same mechanical properties as the virgin fiber.
Recycled Carbon Fiber from Carbon Conversions Process
Lastly I need to talk about the companies that have developed and are producing inherently recyclable and reusable resins. I have talked about the PECAN (PolyEster Covalently Adaptable Network) which is a plant-based inherently recyclable and reusable resin that they formulated specifically for use to make wind turbine blades. The same group at NREL had previously developed a plant-based acrylonitrile and manufactured PAN carbon fiber, again for use in wind turbine blades. Their final demonstration 9 meter wind turbine blade was entirely plant based and inherently recyclable.
A Taiwanese company, Swancor Holdings Ltd, which is a global chemical company focused primarily on high value resins and epoxies, has developed what they call EzCiclo which is an inherently recyclable and reusable epoxy resin system. They won a Composites Innovation Award for this resin system at the 2023 JEC conference in Paris. Along with EzCiclo, they also developed CleaVER which is apparently a set of organic enzymes that can take apart their epoxy resin. These two developments make Swancor’s recyclable epoxy resin completely circular.
Finally, there is a French company headquartered in Colombes, near Paris, Arkema, that has an inherently recyclable thermoplastic resin system they call Elium. This resin, even though it is a thermoplastic and is meltable and reformable, has mechanical properties similar to high performance epoxies. So, it can be used with all sorts of different fiber forms and fiber types, i.e. both glass and carbon fiber. Arkema is the chemical company that resulted from the breakup of the French oil giant Total, so they are a very large petrochemical company by European standards. They are marketing this new recyclable thermoplastic resin system in building and construction materials, high pressure composite tanks (probably primarily for hydrogen), and recyclable wind turbine blades that use either glass or carbon fiber.
That’s about it for this week. I certainly hope I didn’t miss too many companies, so if there are other companies in this business that I failed to mention, please let me know and I’ll write a catch up post for you. And I wanted to give everyone a little hint about next week. There is an exciting new development (at least it’s exciting for me) in the creation of oils without the use of petroleum or plants that could potentially, if a company is interested in developing them, be used to manufacture resins and even carbon and other organic fibers without either extraction of the stuff from the ground or taking the time to grow plants to get what you need. Stay tuned to this channel for this next one. The idea is pretty far out, but there are folks that are already doing this in another industry (think Impossible Burger).
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.
I also wanted to let everyone know that I have finished the first draft of my second book. This one is about what I have been writing in these newsletters for the last 6 months or so – sustainability of composites and a path to the future that does not include using fossil fuels for either the raw materials or the process energy to make composites. McFarland got back to me last week, and they decided that they will pick this one up as well. I am actually under contract with them for the book. My ingoing title is “Close the Circle, a Roadmap to Composite Materials Sustainability”. Now the slog to the finish while I prepare the manuscript along with all of the figures, etc. in the manner that McFarland needs to have it to produce the book. That will probably take me past the end of this year, so the book will most likely come out late next summer or early fall next year.
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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