PET is widely used in plastics and textiles leading to over 20 Mt/y of complex waste worldwide for which no closed-loop recycling is viable today. Most complex waste is landfilled or incinerated. There is an urgent need to develop a circular solution to convert complex PET wastes from plastics and textiles back into high-added value products. WHITECYCLE unites 3 brand-owners, 1 PET converter, 2 waste managers, 1 digital deeptech for smart sorting, the world leading enzymatic recycling SME, 1 LCA company, 3 UNIs/RTOs, 1 cluster and 1 management firm. They aim to demonstrate two new processes combining strong scientific and industrial know-how: (i) innovative identification, sorting and separation technologies that will dramatically increase the PET content of complex waste streams to 80%, and (ii) a disruptive enzymatic recycling process that is expected to yield pure PET monomers sustainably even for impure waste streams. PET monomers obtained will be repolymerised and recycled. Thus, 2 t of waste will be used to demonstrate 3 highly technical PET-containing pilot series: 100 tyres, 1,500 m of lay-flat hoses and 400m2 of multicomponent fabric that will be coated and used to manufacture 4 lines of technical garments. Process design kits, LCA and production cost estimates will be provided to PET manufacturers and waste management companies for rapid deployment and assure social acceptance. First projections show that WHITECYCLE’s recycled PET will be competitive with virgin PET. The project will conduct a full circle loop from real complex waste feedstock to representative product of the 3 use-cases at TRL 5. Then, a strong upscale study will allow the process steps to reach TRL 6 to 8. By 2030, WHITECYCLE will enable the annual recycling of more than 2 Mt of PET, which corresponds to the amount of additional recycled PET needed to meet the EU’s 2030 targets. This will reduce emissions by around 2.06 Mt CO2eq and avoid the landfilling of more than 1.8 Mt of PET.

The BlackCycle project has an upcycling ambition, targeting to create a circular economy of the end-of-life tyre (ELT) into technical applications like tyre industry by producing high technical second raw materials (SRMs) from ELTs. A key lever is to consider the circular economy of tyre domain: recycle ELT into new tyres. Known technologies in this domain are today limited and this new research project will have the ambition to pass their roadblocks, and deliver new technical raw materials relevant for tyre production or other technical products. This project will proactively integrate these new materials (SRMs) and validate that the progress in all the key tyre performances having environmental impacts is not slowed down. The BlackCycle project aims at creating, developing and optimising a full value chain, from ELT feedstock to SRMs, with no waste of resources in any part of the chain and a specific attention for the environmental impact. Eventually, close to 1 out of every 2 ELT will go through this new recovery process which will be the only virtuous cycle of this magnitude amongst all industrial sectors in the recovery of end of life products. In effectively implementing this change, the European tyre industry will be a world leader in a more sustainable tyre production. Indeed, the main product obtained at the end of the project would be a new tyre where many raw materials come from ELT. In particular, the carbon black, a material representing ~20% of tyre composition, will be fully obtained from oils extracted from waste tyres through the pyrolysis process. Furthermore, several chemical and plasticizers will also be obtained from pyrolytic oil refining. The final product would have a high added value from an environmental point of view, because more than 25% of the total weight would come from recycled ELT.