A Unique Recycling Solution to Biopharma Single-Use Plastic

As circular economy thinking takes hold among policy makers, civil servants and scientists, policy is tending towards circular as a strategy to reach environmental objectives.  Hopes are that  production systems will continue to deliver and indeed grow economically, but with far less material and fossil energy intensity. The Swedish Government formed its own Circular Economy Delegation last year and recently announced its national strategy for the Circular Economy  and 100 measures to transition to circularity. Policy needs to align, but this raises questions. The economy is a complex adaptive system, and any intervention may cause the opposite of the intended effects. This article explores my own very personal reflections based on earlier work together with my recent work with the local university.  

Intelligent re-use of hundreds of mammoth end-of-life turbine blades got a boost today, as European wind engineers Vestas spun into recycling. The Aarhus -headquartered engineer has fabricated over 1,000 blades at its UK base on the Isle of Wight, and recently hinted it may soon confirm up to 2,000 new jobs in the North East.    It supplies blades of up to 110 metres to projects worldwide, including SSE Renewables’ 1GW Seagreen park off the Angus coast. The company announced today a breakthrough in technique for recovering for second use the epoxy materials used to fabricate the giant structures.  Vestas leads CETEC – Circular Economy for Thermosets Epoxy Composites – , a circle of chemical engineers, academics and manufacturers.