Green Tech Magazine December 2017 en

ecHQ in granulate form which
is used to make Trodat stamps.
GREEN TECH MAGAZINE 11
Plastic waste as a
reusable raw material
Employing the help of a new value-added process, new goods can be replaced
by quality recyclates in a technically and economically sensible way.
Credits: Alex Koch, Katharina Wassler, Trodat
What can material recycling
of plastics achieve?
Secondary raw materials in the plastics sector
have so far barely been used in high-quality
products due to the quality requirements. Our
goal is to keep valuable plastics in the product
cycle as long as possible and to manufacture
functional components entirely from recycled
material. This enables us to achieve a significant
reduction in CO 2
emissions and high resource
efficiency, because the plastic does not have
to be manufactured again at great expense.
An important requirement in this process is
cost saving, only then can one actually speak
of sustainability on a social, ecological and
economic level.
What does the upcycling process
look like?
In the course of the Rec2TecPart research project
we were able to prove that virgin material
can be replaced by recycled material entirely
sensibly from a technical and economical
perspective. We have demonstrated this using
the plastic streams of three products: an
automotive interior part, a stamp and a multi-layer
film. The process looks like this: We
start with the market’s requirements, define
what a product needs and only then tap into
the adequate secondary ‘post-industrial’ and
GREEN TALENTS –
Introducing young
researchers
Matthias Katschnig, Plastics
Engineer:
Matthias Katschnig studied
plastics technology and
industrial management at
Montanuniversität Leoben.
He is currently writing his
dissertation at the chair of
plastics processing. One of
his research foci is plastics
upcycling.
‘post-consumer’ material sources for the customised,
high-quality material RecHQ. This is
the only way to know that we can work economically.
What results has research led to?
We have made it all the way to industrial implementation
with the upcycling of the plastic
POM. Together with the plastics processor
Thermoplastkreislauf and product manufacturer
Trodat, we have brought a stamp entirely
made from quality recycled material to
series production maturity. One million units
are now produced in a CO 2
-neutral way every
year. That’s a great achievement. Every kilo
of plastic that does not have to be produced
saves around two to four kilos of CO 2
.
What other possibilities do
these insights open up?
We are already going one step further. In the
framework of our latest research project called
Tex2Mat we are trying to dissolve plastic fibres
from textiles, granulate them and make
them suitable for spinning again to allow these
fibres to be incorporated into textiles again.
Clothes shall thus become clothes again. The
use of PET from bottles for textiles is already
being practised, after all. But our approach is
completely new.