The aim of the new €9.6 million WhiteCycle project, coordinated by Michelin, is to enable the annual recycling of more than two million tons of PET fibres from complex waste extracted from end-of-life products such as tyres, hoses and multi-layer clothes by 2030.

With European funding of nearly €7.1 million, the public/private partnership includes 16 organisations based in five countries (France, Spain, Germany, Norway and Turkey) and will run for four years.

The consortium will develop new processes required throughout the industrial value chain including new sorting technologies, to enable a significant increase of the PET plastic content of complex waste streams in order to better process them, a pre-treatment for recuperated PET plastic content, followed by a recycling enzyme-based process to decompose it into pure monomers in a sustainable way.

It will also develop the repolymerization of the recycled monomers into new plastic and fibres and explore the fabrication and quality verification of new products made of the recycled materials.

In addition to tyre maker Michelin and fibre manufacturer Kordsa, participants include the French cluster Axelera, consulting company Dynergie  and green chemistry company Carbios. The enzymatic recycling technology developed by Carbios deconstructs any type of PET plastic waste into its basic components.

Also involved are the German Institutes of Textile and Fibre Research Denkendorf (DITF), ERASME, an EU Jean Monnet Excellence Centre, ESTATO, a certified waste and energy management company, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL), IFTH, the French technological reference centre for the fashion, textile and clothing sectors, supplier of consulting and software solutions iPoint, IRIS, a Spanish deep-tech company, research laboratory PPRIME Institute, and Synergies, which is developing an automated industrial sorting and dismantling process.

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