Lineat Composites has won the CompositesUK industry sustainability award for the work performed in the Carbon Fibre Circular Alliance (CFCA) project. This collaborative project was set-up together with the WorldSailing Trust to demonstrate true circularity for carbon fibre by taken broken carbon fibre sport components and reclaiming and re-using the fibres back into new sport components.
The sports industry, including marine, uses an estimated 15 ktonne of carbon fibre every year, making it the third biggest user of carbon fibre by volume. These components often only have a short lifetime of less than 3 years, giving sport a large carbon footprint as it is estimated that over 90% of carbon fibre ultimately ends up in landfill. The CFCA project was set-up to show how single-use carbon fibre can be turned into a multi-use material with Lineat’s Aligned Formable Fibre Technology (AFFT).
Lineat broke down scrap sport components (tennis rackets, bike frames, masts and ski-poles) into small 3-10mm chips and send these for fibre recovery, and then re-aligned the short fibres into new uni-directional tapes, which were used to substitute existing virgin materials and make new sport components again.
Lineat’s aims to not only align fibres, but also people and stakeholders in the supply chain. CTO Lourens Blok: ’We have completed what we set out to do and more. We showed our main goal that we can close the loop for carbon fibre from a broken component to a new component, and moreover have created new strong collaborative links to continue developing this circular route for carbon fibre’.
