New Products from Waste PVC Flooring and Safe End-of-Life Treatment of Plasticisers
Circular Flooring aims to establish a circular recycling process for plasticized PVC from post-consumer waste flooring. For PVC products, only recycling rates of 20% have been achieved so far, while a large percentage of the PVC waste is still landfilled or incinerated. In order to avoid the loss of valuable resources, increased CO2 emissions and other environmental burdens of waste disposal, it is necessary to establish closed recycling loops for various material streams, as for example PVC floor coverings.
Therefore, the Circular Flooring consortium is further developing the CreaSolv® Recycling Process to separate the PVC-resin from post-consumer floor coverings from legacy plasticisers (phthalic acid esters) that are not conform to the EU REACH-Directive. In the course of the project, waste floor coverings will be collected and shredded into smaller particles before they are treated in the CreaSolv® Recycling Process that separates PVC from plasticisers. The extracted legacy phthalic acid esters will subsequently be deactivated by catalytic hydrogenation, which allows for recycling into REACH-compliant alternatives. The recovered PVC will then be further upgraded with tailored additives before it can be reused in new floor coverings and re-enter the market (cf. Figure 1).
As a result, Circular Flooring contributes to a circular European economy and a sustainable, holistic resource recovery at technological scale.
Figure 1: Circular Flooring outline enabling circular use of plasticised PVC from waste flooring by CreaSolv® Recycling Process and catalysed hydrogenation ©Circular Flooring. Design: Jürgen Lindl | IDEEN DIE FRUCHTEN
Objectives
The main objectives of Circular Flooring are:
- Assessment of PVC market data and the status of availability, collection and treatment status of PVC floor coverings
- Development of a logistics and collection concept for post-consumer PVC flooring waste
- Customisation and up-scaling of the CreaSolv® Recycling Process for the removal of legacy plasticisers from waste PVC flooring
- Development of a catalytic hydrogenation route to convert the extracted phthalate esters into REACH-compliant plasticisers
- Upgrading of the recovered PVC with additives to reach the quality of virgin material
- Production and testing of new floor coverings based on the recycled material together with flooring industry partners
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), economic evaluation and development of a sustainability passport
- Communication, dissemination and exploitation of the project results towards industry, politics and the general public
Funding
The Circular Flooring project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 821366.
| Project | Circular Flooring – New products from waste PVC flooring and safe end-of-life treatment of plasticisers |
|---|---|
| Grant agreement | 821366 |
| Duration | June 2019 – May 2024 |
| Budget | 5.4 million EUR |
| Coordinator | Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV |
| Consortium | 11 partners from 5 countries |
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 821366. The views and opinions expressed in this project are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union and REA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.