The ”Waste4Future” flagship project aims to create new opportunities for recycling plastics in order to make the carbon they contain available as a ”green” resource for the chemical industry. ”We are thus paving the way for a circular carbon economy in which valuable new base molecules are obtained from plastic waste and emissions are largely avoided: Today's waste becomes tomorrow's resource,” says Dr. Sylvia Schattauer, Deputy Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Microstructure of Materials and Systems IMWS, which is leading the project. ”With the expertise of the participating institutes, we want to show how the comprehensive recycling of plastic-containing waste is possible and ultimately economical without the loss of carbon through interlinked, networked processes.” The project, which will run until the end of 2024, should result in innovative recycling technologies for complex waste that can be used to obtain high-quality recyclates.
Specifically, the plan is to develop a holistic, entropy-based evaluation model that reorganizes the recycling chain, which has been process-led to date, into a material-led chain. A new type of guided sorting recognizes which materials and in particular which plastic fractions are contained in the waste. Based on this analysis, the overall stream is separated and a targeted decision is then made for the resulting partial streams as to which recycling method is the most technically, ecologically and economically sensible for this specific waste volume. What cannot be reused by means of mechanical recycling is available for chemical recycling, always with the aim of retaining as many carbon compounds as possible. This eliminates the thermal recycling of plastic waste at the end of the chain.
The challenges for research and development are considerable. These include the complex evaluation of both input materials and recyclates according to ecological, economic and technical criteria. Material recycling must be optimized, and processes and technologies for the key points in the material use of plastic fractions must be established. In addition, suitable sensor technology must be developed that can reliably identify materials in the sorting system. Machine learning methods will also be used and a link with a digital twin that represents the properties of the processed materials will be sought.
Another aim of the project is the automated optimization of the formulation development of recyclates from different material streams. Last but not least, an economic evaluation of the new recycling process chain will be carried out, for example with regard to the effects of rising prices for CO2 certificates or new regulatory requirements. The project consortium will also carry out comprehensive life cycle analysis (LCA) studies for the individual recycling technologies in order to identify potential environmental risks and opportunities.
Fraunhofer IZFP is contributing its extensive expertise and decades of know-how in the non-contact characterization of materials, including in the field of thermography, with regard to mechanical-technological properties, internal structures and identity. In addition, the data fusion required for the novel sorting process will be carried out at Fraunhofer IZFP and a machine learning model tailored to the explicit sorting task will be developed and trained.