A new partnership of 17 organisations aims to develop a circular economy to convert complex waste containing textile made of plastic into products with high added value. Called WhiteCycle, the project was launched on 1 July.
The project: The WhiteCycle project is being coordinated by Michelin and co-financed by the Horizon Europe programme of the European Commission.
- The WhiteCycle ambition by 2030 is to foster the annual recycling of more than 2 million tonnes of the third most widely used plastic in the world—PET.
- The project expects that it would be possible to reduce CO2 emissions by approximately 2 million tonnes and to avoid the landfilling or incineration of more than 1.8 million tonnes of plastic each year.
- Composite industrial waste containing textile (PET) and other components from tires, hoses and multilayer clothes at the end of the product life cycle—which is currently difficult to recycle—could soon become recyclable.
- That material could go into producing new plastic for tires, hoses and clothes.
The partners: Seventeen public and private European organisations are combining their scientific and industrial expertise:
- 3 industrial partners (Michelin, Mandals, Inditex);
- 2 waste management companies (Synergie TLC, ESTATO);
- 1 intelligent sorting SMB (Iris);
- 1 biological recycling SMB (Carbios);
- 1 PET plastic processing plant (KORDSA);
- 1 product life cycle analysis company (i-Point);
- 6 universities, research and technology organizations (PPRIME, Université de Poitiers, DITF, IFTH, ERASME, HVL);
- 1 business cluster (Axelera);
- 1 project management practice (Dynergie).
The aims: The consortium will establish the new processes required for the various steps in the value chain:
- Sorting technologies that make it possible to considerably increase the plastic content of complex waste streams in order to better process them;
- A pre-process for recuperated plastic, followed by a very innovative recycling process (using an enzyme) which sustainably disintegrates the pre-processed plastic into pure monomers;
- Repolymerisation of the resulting plastic monomers to produce like-new plastic;
- Quality verification of the new products made with the plastic resulting from recycled complex waste.
