Recycling processes of sport equipment by selective dissolution in bio-based solvents

Engineering of Sport 15 - Proceedings from the 15th International Conference on the Engineering of Sport (ISEA 2024)

Sport equipment are mainly directed to landfill at their end-of-life due to the difficulty to efficiently separate and recycle their multi-material assembly. Every year several kTons of thermoplastic materials, that could be reused, are discarded thus creating great environmental problems that affects the sustainability of sport equipment. For this reason, we have developed a series of new processes for the efficient and cost-effective recycle of sport equipment. In case the sorting of the different parts is not feasible by standard separation techniques (e.g. in the case of multi-injected materials or glued materials) the best option is dissolution recycling. In this type of recycling, a solvent is used to selectively dissolve a material that is separated from the others by filtration. This approach differs significantly from chemical recycling, since the macromolecular structure of the material is not affected, and the polymer can be simply recovered by solvent evaporation or precipitation in a nonsolvent. Therefore, the mechanical properties of the polymers are maintained, and no repolymerization is needed. In this communication we report the recycle of motorcycle helmets using a selective dissolution in bio-based solvents. A similar approach has been implemented for other products such as surfboards, shoes and many others.