I saw another article in Composites World about a new 50,000 square foot facility at the University of Maine that broke ground in October. According to the article in Composites World, this facility, called the Green Engineering and Materials (GEM) building is intended as a hybrid manufacturing test bed, a place to train the future workforce in sustainable manufacturing, and implementation of bio-based and sustainable materials and technologies in manufacturing. The article in Composites world says that UMaine intends for the primary focus of the GEM facility to be on composites sustainability and bio-based materials.
Artist’s Rendering of GEM Facility – Composites World 11/25/2024
The GEM is intended to serve as a large scale digital additive and hybrid manufacturing test bed for companies looking to integrate advanced manufacturing into their processes and operations. They are targeting the big, high tonnage industries like wind turbine blade manufacturing and the marine industry (boat hulls). They are also going to focus on production of building materials that are bio-based and sustainable for the affordable housing industry. This is an area where UMaine can make a very positive impact given that they are successful.
This is just one example of many that are popping up both here in the U.S. and to a larger extent in Europe. To that end, there is another article I came across from the January 13, 2023 edition of Composites World that talks about a Danish company, Continuum Composite Recycling, that is increasing their wind turbine blade recycling capacity by building new industrial scale facilities to handle the coming onslaught of end of life wind turbine blades.
In addition to making major investments in new facilities, they are also developing a means of incorporating their finely ground and optically sorted recycled material into new and inherently recyclable materials for new wind turbine blades. The first of their facilities in Denmark is supposed to come on line at the end of this calendar year, then they plan to build another one in the UK near the offshore wind farms in the North Sea. Then they are going to move on and build 4 more facilities by 2030 in France, Germany, Spain and Turkey. These 6 facilities will be able to recycle 216,000 tons of recyclable wind turbine blades per year. That’s a pretty big dent in a very large problem.
I have, of course, talked about the Swiss company, Composite Recycling, that has teamed up with a company in Sweden, Fiberloop, to develop the market and do the testing required to use machines built by Fiberloop which use a lower temperature pyrolysis-like thermal process they call Thermolysis. This process, with the temperature well controlled, separates the resin from the fibers and results in not only clean fibers, but also an oily product they call Thermolysis Oil. Composite Recycling has done extensive testing of this process and the materials that result from it, and has worked through some of the more difficult processes of getting these thermolysis oils accepted into the composites industry as resin precursors for making new wind turbine blades.
Artist’s Conception of Composite Recycling’s 40’ Thermolysis Machine – Courtesy Composite Recycling
Their process at present is tailored to polyester resins which liquify into thermolysis oil at a lower temperature than do epoxies, although they have done extensive testing with epoxies and have dialed in the temperature at which they could do the same thing with a carbon fiber / epoxy composite. Their focus now is on recycling wind turbine blades because that is where the highest tonnage need is for use of the process embodied in Fiberloop’s machines. And of course, Fiberloop has plans drawn up for larger machines with higher tonnage capacity. To that end, Composite Recycling is talking to the people in Sweetwater, Texas about building a permanent facility in Sweetwater to start to actually work on the pile of end of life wind turbine blades that has been sitting there for several years. Their plan would be to install a large scale machine from Fiberloop, get it operational and qualified, and turn it over to a company like GE or some other recycling company to start processing the mountain of used wind turbine blades stacked up there. And of course they could add capacity when needed rather easily once they get the first large scale Fiberloop machine up and running.
Another facility in the US is the Composite Recycling Technology Center in Port Angeles Washington, right across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Vancouver, BC. This facility broke ground in September of 2015, and is now operating at full capacity. The Center recycles scrap carbon fiber composites from the local aerospace industry (Boeing et. al.) and incorporates the reclaimed carbon fiber into new products. And since they are in the Pacific Northwest, they have also focused on preventing the waste of Coastal Western Hemlock, a ubiquitous tree in the area that used to be either sent to Asia for concrete forms and burned or just ground up and turned into sawdust. They developed a process that uses a thermal modification and lamination of the wood from this ubiquitous and very fast growing tree once considered garbage into sustainable building materials for use in the Pacific Northwest. And they are having the local native American population, the Makah tribe in that area manage the forest for them in a sustainable manner. The native population is allowing the trees to grow and mature for 60 years rather than the traditional 40 years the way this tree was harvested in the past. That allows the Hemlock forest to sustain itself and regrow new Hemlock naturally. They have 30,000 acres of Hemlock forest that is being managed responsibly by the Makah.
In other news from the Pacific Northwest, Boeing has recently inked a 5 year deal with the UK’s ELG Carbon Fiber to repurpose scrap composites, either uncured prepreg cutoffs or trimmed pieces of cured material from their manufacturing operations. ELG Carbon Fiber is the short carbon fiber spin off from the original ELG Carbon Fiber that split off the long carbon fiber recycling business and rebranded it Gen 2 Carbon. Boeing expects to be able to divert as much as a million pounds of scrap cured and uncured carbon fiber composites per year from its 11 composite manufacturing sites in the U.S. and Australia. ELG is building recycling facilities close to the Boeing plants that will allow them to take all of the cured carbon fiber scrap from these facilities, recycle it into useful products, and sell those new carbon fiber products into ELG’s customer base.
In Barcelona, RCA Engineering has developed both mechanical and thermal processes (primarily pyrolysis) for recycling all sorts of different composite types, carbon fiber, glass fiber, Kevlar fiber, etc. And they have designed and prototyped a modular plant intended to be placed near the sites where facilities like wind turbine farms are putting their used blades when they repower their machines. Their market is predominantly the EU, at least for now because the EU not only has this looming problem, they have passed environmental legislation that requires all entities in the EU that have this waste to avoid either incinerating it or landfilling it. Apparently the RCA Engineering facilities are self-contained and have zero emissions to the atmosphere.
I have written before about Carbon Rivers, a small company in Knoxville, Tennessee that in 2022 was starting to scale up their thermolysis process for recycling end of life wind turbine blades. Now in 2024, they have built up their capacity to recycle end of life wind turbine blades to where they recycled about 1000 blades last year. And they are expanding that capacity as fast as the time and money to do so permits. This company uses a process fairly similar to what Composite Recycling uses which enables them to recover not only clean glass fiber but also both a liquid and a gas that come from the decomposition of the polyester resin that was originally holding the glass fibers together. They say that the recovered oil and gas can be used for energy, but in the future you can bet that this recovered organic material will find its way into new resins to make new wind turbine blades. Carbon Rivers hasn’t quite gotten to the point that Composite Recycling has in that they do not market their thermolysis oil or their gas for use in new resins.
Recycled Carbon Fiber from Carbon Conversions
I have also written about Carbon Conversions. This company, established in 2008 in Lake City, South Carolina, now has a 50,000 square foot facility that sorts through carbon fiber composite waste, chops it to the length that you see in the pic above, and removes the resin by pyrolysis. While this is certainly not completely circular, they at least salvage the carbon fiber in a usable form. And they incorporate this chopped up fiber into a carbon fiber / thermoplastic composite that retains nearly all of the original mechanical properties of the fiber, albeit in chopped form rather than continuous. They were granted a patent for their carbon fiber / thermoplastic composite products in 2020, and since then have been able to sell their recycled product into the automotive, electronics, and sporting goods industries.
One last facility I want to talk about here is one that I have at least mentioned in another post. This is the facility that has recently been announced in Salt Lake City near Hexcel’s large carbon fiber composite manufacturing facility. The company that has installed this facility in Salt Lake is Fairmat, headquartered in Paris. They have had an ongoing relationship with Hexcel’s operation in the EU since 2021, and have recently opened this new facility in Salt Lake that is going to recycle all of the scrap from Hexcel’s carbon fiber composite facility there. Hexcel’s Salt Lake facility is the largest carbon fiber manufacturing facility in the U.S. so the 10 year agreement that they signed with Hexcel is an extension of the agreements that they have with Hexcel in Europe. Both of Fairmat’s facilities, the one in France and the one in Salt Lake are about 15,000 square feet and have the capacity to recycle all of the scrap from the Hexcel facility with room to expand their capabilities. In Europe, they have contracts both with Hexcel and with Dassault Aviation, and apparently were able to recycle 30% of Europe’s carbon fiber waste within a year of opening their first facility in France.
The companies and organizations written about above are just the newer facilities that have either come on line, expanded their capacity, or opened new end of life composite processing capability. These companies span the entire landscape of recyclable composites, from high tonnage composite waste like wind turbines and old boat hulls to aerospace grade carbon fiber composites, and everything in between. There are companies that have been in this business for a decade or more that are still in business and still recycling end of life composites at their existing facilities.
The real story here is that this business is very rapidly expanding and we are starting to see, finally, that there is actually light at the end of this tunnel that is not an oncoming train. I for one am very encouraged by what I see emerging as a strong and viable community of companies that are actually making money recycling end of life composites. Good news indeed.
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.
I also wanted to let everyone know that I have finished the first draft of my second book and it is ready to go to my publisher. I only need to get permission to use a few more images and this thing is in the hands of McFarland Books. I have talked about this one now for a month or two to let everyone know it 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.
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.
Before I go, however, I need to rant a little bit about AI and especially ChatGPT. I wanted to put together a synopsis of my first book and publish it through Kindle as a short e-book. So I asked ChatGPT to do that for me. That was an absolute failure. Not only did ChatGPT not know how to synopsize a book, all I got back was a list of chapter headings with bulleted lists of some topics that were covered in the chapter. And that was only for the first two chapters. I got nothing else. I even gave ChatGPT time to do it and set a deadline for the end of last month, which was more than a month into this whole exercise.
Needless to say, that not only was a waste of time, it cemented my thinking about the AI apps that have come up that are supposed to help us and/or take over humanity. I’m not buying either side of that argument. I think the people who put this stuff together are blowing a whole lot of smoke right now, just to start generating some revenue. AI is not ready for prime time.
Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy of the actual book: 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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