Public Funding for Axion Recycling LTD.

"The move to a circular economy is vital for the development of industry and the protection of the environment. One material constantly in the spotlight is plastics. Plastic is a highly engineered, indispensable material used over a wide range of applications. One of the strengths of thermoplastics is the potential ability to recycle the same material many times and make use of it in a circular economy. However, there is still a significant volume of plastic that is not recycled currently, and is destined for landfill or incineration. This material is the residual Mixed Engineering Plastics (MEP), which contains a wide range of less-common polymer types and importantly a significant proportion of legacy additives which are a concern when recycling the material. Within the ReCLAIM project, Axion Recycling, Trojan Services, Crompton Mouldings, and University of Birmingham will address these problems by: developing new processes for greater recovery of polymer fractions from MEP; creating chemical and physical methods for making BFRs biologically unavailable in the recycled polymers and verifying their efficacy; and proving that the polymer is suitable for real end markets. The results from ReCLAIM will boost competitiveness of the partner organisations by adding to their product lines, increasing revenue, and reducing operating costs. The benefits to the UK will be increased economic activity, new jobs, a reduction in waste incinerated or sent to landfill, and significant CO2 savings."

"Our vision is to create a safe, economically sustainable battery recycling supply chain in the UK allowing industrial batteries from vehicles to be recycled into base components and materials, which are subsequently reused. Ultimately, we seek to demonstrate a scalable process that will lead to the UK being the primary battery recycling hub in Europe. Our aim is to extract maximum value from battery packs at their end of life by repurposing the component materials. Not only will this result in less waste, it will also decrease the materials that need to be imported from abroad. Clearly, the automotive industry would be a primary user of this supply chain: project collaborator Nissan, one the major automotive OEMs, have a large EV fleet where vehicles approaching end of life. The objectives of the project are as follows: - * Assess the performance of end of life packs and investigate the artificial ageing of new lithium batteries. Battery packs age to different extents during their lifetimes. It is unclear if the ageing process affects the recyclability of lithium cells. By artificially aging a selection of new lithium cells to replicate different conditions of use, we can assess the impact on recycling. The methodology to artificially age new packs to accurately replicate end of life conditions is innovative. * The disassembly of lithium batteries down to base materials and components is not well understood. Furthermore, there are multiple routes for disaggregation, complicated by the number of design variations and number of chemistries available. This project seeks to establish a design- and chemistry-agnostic recycling methodology. * The incumbent cell recycling methodologies are based on cobalt recovery. However, with manufacturers striving to decrease cobalt content in order to lower the cost of batteries at point of sale, the amount of recoverable cobalt is decreasing. We seek to establish an alternative recycling methodology capable of economically recovering more than the incumbent process, which can be demonstrated at pilot scale by Project Calibre * An objective of the proposal is to reuse and upgrade the recovered materials in battery manufacture. This will be demonstrated at lab scale. The performance of the materials will be dependent on the methods of disassembly and recovery. The project seeks to feedback battery performance data to inform and optimise the disassembly and recovery processes."

The 36 month REALITY project will enable the development and industrial deployment of sensor-based scrap sorting technologies to separate wrought and cast alloys and then to further separate wrought alloys into alloy types for the first time. Full scale recycled scrap based sheet and castings will be produced and evaluated. End-of-life vehicles will be shredded and automatically sorted using state of the art sensing and sorting technologies. The recovered wrought and cast scrap will be alloyed, melt conditioned to remove or tolerate impurities and then supplied for either coil production or for the commercial scale shape casting production by high pressure vacuum diecasting. Materials evaluation and characterisation will be carried out on both the resultant sheet and cast product forms. Cost effective automated separation processes for shredder scrap will enable the closed-loop recycling of end-of-life vehicles back into high performance product forms for new vehicle body manufacture in the UK, providing significant CO2 savings (less or no primary metal) and major cost savings. The UK, the major exporter or the more than 1Mt of aluminium scrap from the EU each year, will be uniquely placed to use rather than export this precious scrap based secondary aluminium alloy resource.

Awaiting Public Summary

Currently circular economy business models are not common practice within the UK healthcare sector, yet many other countries have already benefited from a shift away from the traditional linear value chain. Axion will work with Philips, a world leader in the supply of medical imaging systems and therapy devices, to investigate how a circular economy business model to supply refurbished medical imaging and ultrasound equipment as a fully-maintained and managed service could be established at UK hospitals. This project will explore how the proposed business model can work within the UK and investigate the unique barriers of the UK healthcare sector and how they can be overcome through innovative approaches to maintenance, upgrading, refurbishment and re-use for this category of complex healthcare equipment. This is an ambitious project that could have a significant impact on the UK healthcare sector allowing for a more sustainable future whilst also increasing the affordability of vital diagnostic equipment for UK hospitals.

Flexible packaging such as plastic bags, sweet wrappers, frozen food bags and pouches makes up 32% of consumer plastic packaging in the UK, however virtually all of this 556,000 tonnes ends up in landfill. By contrast 58% of plastic bottles are recycled. Our vision is to achieve a circular economy for flexible packaging and divert it from landfill. To achieve this, innovative recyclable flexible package designs are required, where all the materials used can be reprocessed together. The design will include innovative inks, new barrier polymers, novel packaging designs and a new automated sorting technique. With the backing of Nestle and Unilever, two global brands who see consumer value in offering recyclable packaging, industry-wide guidelines for recyclable packaging will be agreed and disseminated. Each step of the process will be trialled during this project, thus demonstrating to the full supply chain that it is viable to create a circular economy in plastic flexible packaging

Outdoor media waste from predominantly plastic advertising banners produces an estimated 1.1 million square metres of material each year. This waste stream is not currently reused and is difficult to recycle due to the design, construction and mix of materials used to produce the banners. Axion is proposing a collaboration with members of the outdoor media supply chain including; the Outdoor Media Centre, advertising/media companies and designers and manufacturers of advertising banners in order to improve upon current banner designs. The primary objective is to produce a fully and easily recyclable banner, with a secondary objective to explore opportunities for novel printing techniques to overprint plastic sheeting for reuse. Re-designing the advertising banners will greatly assist future reuse and recycling efforts and help to support the establishment of an industry wide collection and recycling scheme.

Awaiting Public Project Summary

The objective is to establish the technical and economic feasibility of recovery and re-use of high value materials from fuel cell electrode assemblies. These comprise perfluorosulphonic acid ion-conducting membrane (a highly specialised fluoropolymer), platinum-containing anode and cathode catalyst layers and carbon-fibre based gas diffusion layers. With the projected growth in demand for the carbon fibre and fluoropolymer materials, in both fuel cell and existing markets, if current resource inefficiencies are not addressed, this will increasingly lead to environmental issues and risk of supply disruption. Currently there are no established processes for recovering these high value materials from electrode products and the project therefore seeks innovative technical solutions to accomplish this, thereby improving efficiency in use of key resources, establishing the potential for a new UK-based global recycling business and increasing the competitiveness of the industrial end-user products

The aim of the project is to develop innovative, lightweight, bio-based structural/functional materials with low acoustic transmittance for applications in vehicles. The materials will comprise novel engineering polymers, based on renewably sourced wheat and sugar cane fibre (bagasse) from Tate & Lyle Process Technology (TLPT) and resins. The polymeric composites will be processed by the Wolfson Centre for Materials Processing at Brunel University (WCBU) using moulding techniques. International Automotive Components (IAC) will scale up the production of the mouldings for testing and evaluation by Jaguar Cars Ltd for automotive applications. Axion will investigate the viability of recycling the materials from ELV.