In the textile industry, composite materials are more and more often used due to their specific properties enabling them to be used in very technical applications like the aerospace, automotive or the sports industry. Currently, up to 40% of the material is wasted in the production process, and after a lifetime of 15 to 30 years, 98% of the material ends up in a landfill with no hope to be recycled. With the environmental crisis that is happening, something needs to be done in order to revalorise these materials.
From these observations, the MC4 project was born. It is a European partnership aiming to establish circular approaches for carbon and glass fibre composites. After a 3 years implementation, MC4 will make the European carbon and glass fibre value chains more circular, independent and competitive.
The full name of the project is “Multi -level Circular Process Chain for Carbon and Glass Fibre Composites”. M stands for Multi and C for Circular. As for the number 4, it refers to the number of recycling process we are developing in the project. There are 2 short term and 2 long-term process solutions covering carbon and glass fibre composite value chains. The project is developing process technologies and quality assurance methods that will enable their economic recycling.
Are you curious to know more about the development of those processes? Stay connected, we will focus on the development work done by the expert partners in later posts.