The current growth of the composites industry is rapid with predictions of a 40% increase from 2014 levels by 2020, of this only 2% is in the marine industry and 14% is in the sport and leisure sector. This rapidly growing industry is focusing on the strength, light weight and durability of the material and provides many environmental benefits due to its use, notably in the transportation sector where lightweighting directly results in reduced carbon emissions. However, the inherent nature of the material, its strength, durability and the combination of materials means that it is difficult to recycle.
America's Cup team Land Rover Ben Ainslie Racing (BAR) believes there is commercial viability around the recycling and production of new carbon fibre products. They have used tools such as carbon footprinting and life cycle assessment to put into perspective the impact their test and race boat construction has, and then used these tools to identify where they can make positive changes within their own business as well as across the composites industry.
The state of composites recycling has been recently documented and highlights the limited commercial availability of solutions. The opportunities to
recycle glass fibre are more advanced, with the glass fibre composite waste utilised in cement kilns, which helps to reduce the environmental impact in the
production of cement. Additional uses have been found in timber replacement products for construction.
Carbon fibre on the other hand is costly and energy intensive to produce and there is a great commercial viability around recycling and the production of new carbon
fibre products. Pyrolysis which involves separating the resin from the fibre at high temperature is commercially available; although demand for the facility is outstripping the availability. Solvolysis involves dissolving the resins away from the fibres, leaving the fibres less downgraded with an opportunity to reclaim some of the resin value. However, it’s a process that is currently in its infancy.
Carbon fibre material is used for its strength and durability and the current limited quantities of end of life carbon fibre waste mean that these technologies are slow to progress and bring to scale. This presents an opportunity to challenge the current approach towards the circularity of the material and ensure that the products we are currently manufacturing can be reprocessed and recycled effectively.
The Land Rover BAR team has set itself challenging waste targets with a minimum 60% of all waste to be recycled and the remaining portion to go to energy recovery with zero waste going to land fill. That's a good model to follow. In the future, remanufacturing of the manufacturing waste of the carbon fibre industry could bring the benefits of carbon’s light weight and strength to a number of industry applications.
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10 January 2017
