Lineat Composites is a start-up based in Bristol who are creating the world’s strongest recycled material by re-processing chopped carbon fibre waste into new aligned carbon fibre tapes. Lightweight carbon fibre materials have a heavy impact; they are expensive (>40x the price per kg than steel) and polluting (20x CO2e emissions per kg than steel). Carbon fibre cannot be remelted like metals; thus, offcuts and end-of-life material typically get shredded or milled and put into landfill.
The Lineat process is a high-tech adaption of the traditional papermaking process. Recycled chopped carbon fibre waste, consisting of random fibre bundles, is first dispersed in water in fibre filaments. These are then carefully sprayed between parallel plates to create continuous strands of highly aligned fibres all situated next to each other. By re-aligning the short fibres, the new recycled material mimics the original continuous fibre and retains its high strength properties. This way, single-use carbon fibre becomes a multi-use material. Lineat have already shown this can be used to close the loop for carbon fibre in the sports industry, having creating world’s first recycled tennis racket with W labs using fibres recovered from broken tennis rackets.
Dr. Lourens Blok, the Chief Technology Officer at Lineat Composites, explains, “Our vision is to make carbon fibre a multi-use commodity material and significantly increase the recycling rate from the current <10% to over 50%.”
