Solvay, a leading international chemical group, has announced that its Move4earth project for the recycling of technical textile waste from post-industrial sources is soon set to complete.

Validation of the technology has been completed, and construction is underway for an industrial-scale facility to become operational in 2016 at the project site in Gorzów, Poland.

Move4earth project is one of several Solvay initiatives supported by the European Commission as part of its LIFE+ program and demonstrates the company’s ongoing strong commitment to sustainable development. The project is focused on designing, implementing, and validating an innovative recycling process designed to revalue technical textile waste, initially from airbags, into high-quality polyamide 6.6 (PA6.6) grades with reduced environmental impacts to complement Solvay Engineering Plastics’ Technyl Force portfolio of engineering polymers.

Peter Browning, Solvay Engineering Plastics general manager said, “Move4earth underscores our efforts aimed at reducing the environmental footprint of our activities and those of our customers, and it confirms our dedicated reliance on European industrial assets.”

The project also addresses a need for more effective recycling solutions to help minimise large volumes of valuable engineering plastic waste.

Richard Bourdon, Move4earth project director at Solvay said, “More than 70 per cent of all automotive airbags in Europe are made of silicone-coated nylon fabrics, mostly based on PA 6.6. While regulations such as directive 2000/53/EC are setting high targets for end-of-life recycling and reuse of materials in vehicles, there is no sustainable solution in place for post-consumer airbag waste in Europe. Our mid-term objective is to establish an efficient and sustainable way of re-using these resources and provide pure high-grade PA6.6 recycle compounds with stable properties near those of virgin Technyl resins for a wide range of eco-designed applications.”

Solvay has developed an advanced proprietary recycling technology for separating the airbag fabrics from the coating. The innovative process delivers a PA6.6 premium recycle with no significant loss in material properties, including stable viscosity and robust mechanical performance, according to a press release.

Solvay’s Move4earth project aims to ensure a continuous target throughput under stable process conditions, and to validate value-creating options for the silicone coating by-product separated from the airbag fabrics, which can amount to 15 per cent of the material flow.

Solvay Engineering Plastics is exhibiting the details of the project at FAKUMA 2015 in booth 4213 in Hall B4. (GK)