Move 4earth® project
Move4Earth® is supported by European Commission Life+ programme
OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT
The demand for recycled plastics is growing in all European markets:
- Good environmental performances
- Lower dependency to fossil resources which prices are rather volatile and constantly increasing.
Regulations are pushing for more recycling and less landfilling in Europe. The directive 2000/53/EC sets a 85% target by 2015 for reuse and recycling of post consumer cars, but no sustainable solutions exist for airbags.
Industrial objectives
1. Reach target throughput under stable processing conditions
- Validation of elementary operations
- Validation of entire continous process at nominal throughput
2. Produce a high quality recycled polymer
- Purified
- Stable properties near to traditional Technyl® polymer
Environmental objectives
1. Prove environmental efficiency through Life Cycle Analysis
Minimize energy and water consumption
2. Validate value-creation option for the by-product (Silicon)
Up to 15% of the flow
INDUSTRIAL PROCESS
PROJECT FIGURES & STEPS
More than 70% of car airbags are made of silicon-coated polyamide in Europe
More than 125,000 tons of end-of-life wastes deposit worldwide
Up to 10,000 tons of post-industrial airbag wastes per year in Europe
– September 2012: Project launching
– 2013-2014: Process engineering and validation
– 2015: Demonstrator construction
– 2016: Industrial demonstration of the recycling process completed and Move 4earth® Unit Grand Opening
– 2017-2018: Ramp-up and optimization of the recycling process
MAIN ACTIONS
The main actions of the project can be summarized as follows:
Design and build the demonstrator
- COMPLETED
Validate and optimize the recycling process
- COMPLETED: Process validation
- COMPLETED AND SUCCESSFULL: Ramp-up and optimization
- Production running according to design capacity
- A new range of product has been created for commercial applications in automotive, building and construction, and consumer appliances
Demonstrate valorization streams for By Products (i.e. silicone coating residuals)
- COMPLETED
- Energy valorization stream demonstrated and implemented
- Alternative material recovery solutions demonstrated and implementation started. The silicone residue can be used to produce booster additives for polyolefins
- Other material recovery streams can be explored — Interested? Ask your sample
Assess the environmental impacts of the process and the benefits of the newly created recycling stream based on a Life Cycle Analysis methodology
- COMPLETED
- A “cradle to gate” Life Cycle Analysis performed by Domo shows that TECHNYL® 4EARTH compounds using recycled PA66 polymer from the Move4earth technology offer very significant reductions of environmental impacts compared to equivalent virgin materials
- Summary LCA REPORT available for download — Click here
Confirm the potential use of the Move 4earth®technology to recycle various types of technical textile wastes
- COMPLETED: Beside post-industrial silicone coated fabrics, the project has been focusing on post-consumer airbag cushions and PA/elastane fabrics
- Several tons of post-consumer airbags have been processed with no difficulties. The technology is ready for this type of waste, however challenges remain in order to organize large scale collection networks and also secure a proper decontamination of the fabrics after explosion of the airbag module.
- Trials done with PA/Elastane fabrics have failed. The technology is not suitable for this type of waste.
Future perspectives
- Scale-up projects and collaboration with key players of the automotive value chain to explore future post-consumer airbag collection and recycling streams. Possible closed loop business models
- Design for recycling projects aiming at redesigning some technical textiles (currently not recycled) with PA66/silicone fabrics in order to make them recyclable with the Move4earth technology — Contact us