Technologies for critical raw materials and strategic raw materials from end-of-life products (IA)

Project ideas:

Circular11 and Gen2Plank are two UK-based manufacturing companies that are developing

complementary manufacturing technologies for the mechanical recycling of wind turbine blades.

Gen2Plank can industrially downsize wind-turbine blades, and use them as a filler material in the continuous extrusion of hollow-lumber.

Circular11 can use them as a filler material in solid-filler lumber, and their expertise lies not so much in the downsizing of the blades, as proprietary machine-learning approaches that enable a more standardised output material from changeable post-consumer material, whether that variation  primarily comes from the fibre, or from the mixed post-consumer plastic matrix.

They combine advanced characterisation techniques, automated cleaning and restructuring of data, and trained models that predict and optimise formulations and processing parameters based on the specific features of the input stream at any one moment in time. They are significantly expanding their capacity to extrude filled lumber, and want to make waste-based composites a critical material of the net-zero transition, by using it to plug the billion-tonne undersupply of timber expected by 2050.

We are seeking projects that have complementary approaches to recycling, either using chemical  means, or in other parts of the value chain