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Westlake Corp. (Houston, Texas, U.S.), international manufacturer and supplier of petrochemicals, polymers and fabricated building products, has announced that Westlake Epoxy will collaborate with Alpha Recyclage Composites (Toulouse, France) to support its recycling capacity scale-up for carbon fiber composite materials.
This collaboration will provide support to Westlake’s composite customers in their development of improved circular options for both production (scrap or off-spec composite materials that otherwise become waste) and end-of-life (EOL) waste, while simultaneously adhering to the company’s broader sustainability goals.
Alpha Recyclage Composites is a family-owned company based in Toulouse and Castelsarrasin, France, specializing in recycling carbon fiber-reinforced composites through a patented steam pyrolysis process which preserves the performance qualities of carbon fibers recovered from applications including aerospace components, automotive parts and wind turbine blades. With Westlake’s support, and to meet growing demand, Alpha Recyclage Composites is expanding its current batch unit to a semi-continuous operation, targeting a capacity of 1,000 metric tons of waste carbon fiber composites recycled per year by 2027.
Westlake Epoxy aims to connect its customers to Alpha Recyclage’s expanded capacity and in turn support composite customers in their development of new applications that integrate recycled carbon fibers in different forms. These recovered materials could pair well with Westlake Epoxy’s EpoVive portfolio of resin grades, for example, featuring varying sustainable characteristics like resins that use mass-balanced renewable raw materials. Westlake Epoxy also plans to leverage this collaboration to explore and develop solutions for the recovery of organic components from composite materials and how those recovered organics can be applied to further enhance circularity options for the composites value chain.
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