Giving new life to aged composites!
15 Oct 2025
You know what they always say about reshaping the future… I think it’s finally possible!
I am Jawad, a PhD student and a member of a group of researchers at Icam Ouest, Nantes Site. My job has actually something to do with this topic. Through the past three years, I have been working on a project co-financed by the region Pays de la Loire and the European Union for developing an original method for recycling some materials. We like to call them fiber glass reinforced polyester composites.
Sorry for all the technical words, I may have got a bit carried away there!
The thing goes simply like this. In the last few decades, some interesting materials have become the talk of the town. They replaced the materials we were used to, and then they got into the making of everything, airplanes, cars, boats, sport equipment, wind turbine blades, etc. These materials are called composites, simply because they are the combination of at least two different materials. They are most commonly made out of a binder and a reinforcement. Interestingly, some magical recipes of composites can generate materials that are ten times stronger than your tough guy “steel”, while being five times lighter. I’d call that a good deal! That’s why the global composite market is going to hit 160 billion dollars in 2027!
However, this prosperity is accompanied with a significant amount of composite production waste, defective parts or cutoff pieces. Poor ones. There is also what we call an “end-of-life” or “EoL” composite part. This is a composite that had served its good years doing its job, and now its time to retire and enjoy a hot cup of tea. In 2050, 43 million tons of wind turbine blades will be going out of service. Well, that is going to be quite a lot of tea!
It has been clear that recycling composites is not just an act of “following the trend”. It is a necessity for a better future. The technologies that we dispose today can somewhat deal with the waste materials. The thermoplastics used in the manufacture of composites can be melted down and reworked with. You can check out the work of my colleague E. Farah on polypropylene recycling with active in-line characterization within the project RECYPLAST-DEMO.
Another type of composites, which is the most used, is a bit stubborn, where the binder material is a thermoset. Not the most attractive of names, I know. Recycling or separating this kind of combination is thus not a piece of cake! So, we have to rely on techniques that may sound a bit extreme. Mechanical recycling, for example, is using a grinder to break down large composite parts into small pieces a few centimeters in length. A huge fraction of the once remarkable properties would be lost. Chemical recycling is using strong solvents that can break down the binder liberating the reinforcements. This is quite expensive and the solvents pose a significant risk to the operators. Thermal recycling involves heating the composite up to extremely high temperatures to evaporate the binder, or even burn the whole thing and recover heat energy. And that’s not much of an efficient energy harnessing method!
It’s a real shame that that’s all we’ve got! Or is it?
You see, our goal is to provide another recycling pathway, a method that can mitigate all problems of conventional solutions. And I am lucky to have worked hard enough to establish it during the past three years. My thesis is a part of the European Project RECREATE. It’s not just a fancy acronym, though. It’s a large-scale project involving 21 institutions from 9 European countries meeting together to improve the circular economy of composite materials. The basic concept of our method is trying to reshape the composite part with pressure and temperature without compromising their mechanical properties. Scrap pieces from an EoL boat hull or wind turbine blade have a slight curvature by design. Flattening them would provide us with materials convenient for manufacturing technical boards for the vehicles of public transport. You can call that hitting two birds with one stone! Achieving this goal depends on special mechanical tests to set our operating limits. The collected results directly influence the development of a preindustrial prototype capable of flattening curved composite. The good news? The machine is ready, and it works!
Now isn’t this reshaping the future?
Find this article and orther interesting content on https://www.echosciences-paysdelaloire.fr/.
Mohammad Jawad BERRO
PhD Student at Icam Nantes
LTEN – UMR CNRS 6607
LinkedIn: https://www.
