The European Tyre and Rubber Manufacturers Association (ETRMA) estimates that up to four million tonnes of end-of-life tyres are generated each year in Europe, and Spain alone accounts for 300,000 tonnes. Most of the polyurethane foam from the automotive industry, mattresses and similar products is landfilled, not to mention other difficult-to-recycle plastic waste such as wire waste. According to Plastics Europe, more than 6.5 million tonnes of plastic are sent to landfills each year.
AIMPLAS
The NEOREC Project: A second life for difficult materials
AIMPLAS, as part of the NEOREC Project, is developing advanced chemical and mechanical recycling solutions to prevent this complex waste being sent to landfill by using it to obtain industrial materials and substances.
Chemical recycling processes such as anaerobic degradation are being studied and developed in order to isolate and select micro-organisms that anaerobically biodegrade biopolymers faster than conventional organisms. The endgame is to establish a faster, more efficient recycling process.
Work is also being done to use partial chain-breaking processes to obtain plastics with the same initial specifications.
Chemical Recycling Group Leader Eva Verdejo said “the goals is to reduce the consumption of resources by reintroducing high value-added materials back into the value chain and generating products and by-products that can be used in the plastics industry, thus minimising the environmental impact of waste accumulation”.
AIMPLAS is collaborating on this project with raw material manufacturers, converters, waste managers and recyclers.
The NEOREC Project is funded by the Sustainable Economy, Production Sectors, Trade and Employment of the Valencian Community through IVACE funds and co-funded by ERDF within the Operational Programme of the Valencian Community 2014-2020.
Organisations such as AIMPLAS and Plastics Europe are committed to being the catalysts for great change in the materials production, conversion and recycling industries. Cross industry collaboration, involving various players at each stage of the value chain, has long remained the mantra for enabling success in efficient materials recycling, particularly for PU, which is not as prevalent in household packaging, for example, as PET or PP, and therefore not as widely recycled by the consumer through local infrastructure. Through the participation of research centres and academia, science-based best practices are now being developed and implemented in industry through the activation of catalysis in chemical recycling.