Enabling the Recycling of Foam Mattresses
Depolymerisation: breaking it down to basic building blocks, EVONIK
Evonik has developed a chemical recycling process for polyurethane mattresses. The aim is now to build a pilot plant.
Some 40 million mattresses are discarded each year in Europe alone with the majority ending up as landfill. This creates the equivalent of 600 kilotons of waste, which includes more than 300 kilotons of polyurethane (PU) foam. This is the result of the latest EUROPUR (European association of flexible polyurethane foam blocks manufacturers) report.
Evonik wants to help change this and therefore, initiated an internal project to establish a recycling process for flexible polyurethane foams. The goal of the project is to break down used mattresses into their chemical components and make them recyclable.
A pioneering efficient polyurethane mattress recycling process
Evonik is developing a new hydrolysis recycling process. This process offers a route to obtain a high- quality recycled polyol – a main building block for polyurethane foams – that can be used in significantly higher use levels compared with existing commercialised technologies. Furthermore, trials of the recycled polyol in several of its flexible foam producers at The Vita Group are yielding positive results.
Environmentally friendly production processes and end products are increasingly becoming a decisive factor for flexible foam producers. Therefore, it is key to recycle products back to their raw materials and reusing them repeatedly to enable a fully circular economy. Evonik’s new hydrolysis process has the potential to produce recycled material that provides an alternative to virgin raw material in both quality and performance. Thus, helping foam producers to meet their own sustainability targets, while continuing to deliver high-quality PU products.
At Evonik, the recycling project now resembles a huge mosaic that is being worked on in parallel at several locations and with different functions. Next step on the road to enable circularity for flexible polyurethane foams is to build a pilot plant in Hanau, Germany. The new plant will be used to obtain the main components of polyurethanes in larger quantities.