Don’t get the recycling bins yet as carbon nanotube recycling isn’t quite ready to implemented, from the Jan. 23, 2013 news item on Nanowerk,
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are set to become an important material for the future. That’s because they are light, robust, and highly conductive, both electrically and thermally whilst still being chemically stable. They are used in broad variety of applications ranging from bicycle components to hydrogen storage. The trouble is that the nanotube manufacturing process is not as sustainable and cost-effective as it could be.
The Jan. 23, 2013 Youris news release by Hywel Curtis, which originated the news item, describes a carbon nanotube recycling project and some of its challenges,
The RECYTUBE project, funded by the European Union, aims to reuse CNT scraps created during production to turn them into new plastic nanocomposites. “Conductive polymers need very specific and expensive fillers, so the project is studying how to recycle CNT production waste to make these fillers more cheaply and easily than is currently done,” explained Pascual Martinez, technical and research engineer at Faperin S.L., Ibi, Spain, one of the project’s technical leads. “We have already produced some injected plastic pieces of reused conductive polymer to demonstrate this.”
The critical test for the project will be whether such a solution is taken up by industry. Some believe the main driver would be to save costs. “There is tremendous growing interest in using reprocessed plastics, both in form of regrinds and re-granulates; mainly due to cost reasons in the commodity sector,” Klaus Mauthner, head of research and development at C-Polymers, Tresdorf, Austria, tells youris.com. He adds: “with nano-composites it could work in the same way.”
There don’t seem to be any details on RECYTUBE website about this recycling technology other than this on the home page,
The aim of RECYTUBE is to develop a methodology to reuse the CNT-containing scraps in the masterbach production, compounding and injection moulding conductive plastic parts. To do so, fast in situ (during production) characterisation of the CNT scraps, based in physical, thermal, mechanical and electrical properties measurements, need to be developed in order to assess which proportion of CNT containing scrap must be added to the virgin polymer to get the desired final properties. Finally, two new products for the production of both an external and an internal conductive plastic part for the automotive Industry [sic] will be developed, adapting to industrial scale the masterbach production, compounding and injection moulding processes reusing CNT scraps.
It seems we’re a very long way off from recycling carbon nanotubes.