Following the first General Assembly of the European Circular Composites Alliance (ECCA) in Brussels, Ilkay Özkisaoglu spoke to Malcolm Forsyth, Sustainability Manager at Composites UK.
In this video, Malcolm discusses the definition of sustainability and end of life versus end of service, the waste hierarchy and composites recycling, and the challenge of converting market applications to recycled content. He goes on to explain why Composites UK supports the ECCA.
“Obviously the UK is not politically part of Europe anymore, but geographically the UK is part of Europe and the challenge of creating more circularity with composites is a global one. And what we don’t want is each country or region all developing their own solutions, because that will mean a lot of repetition, a lot of overlap, a lot of wasted effort. So we’re here because we want to support the whole European industry … Many of our members export products into the European Union, and many of them get their raw materials from the European Union …”
“The problem of composite waste does not recognise national borders, and we need to be working in a way that will allow us as easy movement as possible of composite waste from country to country. It will not make sense for every country to have its own little circular composites systems, to necessarily have a recycling plant in every country. That isn’t going to be the most economic way. The most economic way is to have some maybe slightly larger hubs where bigger quantities of material are processed, and some of those hubs might well be in the UK, some of them will be in Europe. And I would like to see movement of waste and recycled products going the two different ways.”
“We need to make sure the UK and Europe are working well together, sharing ideas, sharing initiatives …”
