11/01/2024

Covestro Invests in R&D, Showcasing Potential Circular Materials

Plastics News | Sarah Kominek | Oct. 25, 2024

Covestro Invests in R&D, Showcasing Potential Circular Materials

Plastics News | Sarah Kominek | Oct. 25, 2024

Covestro is tackling monomaterials as a pillar of its circularity goals in automotive and electronics applications to help customers design parts and devices that are easier to recycle at end of life as it invests in R&D operations globally.

The material supplier created a design guideline with requirements for its customers, partners, technicians and application developers to create examples of ways monomaterials can be used, Tim Lemacher, key account manager of engineering plastics at Covestro, told Plastics News at the Fakuma trade show.

Components and products with different textured features and parts including films and overmolding can be made of one single base material, Lemacher said, such as polycarbonates or acrylic, making "more or less the whole device … out of the same class of material."

At Fakuma, Covestro showcased a control panel application for its monomaterial PC, Makrolon. The panel has PC films on either side with overmolded, integrated printed circuit boards connected to Covestro's new thermally conductive PC, which creates the panel's touch functions.

"The disassembly process is getting easier," he said, thanks to overmolding allowing for easy removal of printed circuit board and other electronic features.

Once the electronics are removed from the device, it can be shredded and mechanically recycled into "compounds that we can use in our materials," he said, adding that, through collaborations with customers and suppliers, Covestro is discussing ways electronics and automotive parts can become a part of a circular industry.

Application development guidelines, technical data, simulation data and optical data from every part of the supply chain is essential for potential circularity of a part or device, Lemacher said.

"The world of plastics is large … and [data and collaboration are] everything," he said.

Since K 2022 in Düsseldorf, Germany, "the whole industry got the point that sustainability and circularity will probably be the most important topic for decades now," he said. "Since then, basically all our exchanges we have … on a daily basis with our customers are … how can we get back our waste from the industry? Can we use biomass — biomass feedstocks, for example — for our products? Is there any chance to use mechanically recycled components in your compounds to produce our applications?"

Covestro's recent partnership with Neste and Borealis focuses on the closed-loop recycling of old tires into transparent polycarbonates, suitable for automotive components like car headlamps. Covestro's Makrolon RP product range incorporates the chemically recycled raw materials through mass balance methodology.

"Covestro can put these new feedstocks into our production to achieve highly transparent polycarbonates," Lemacher said. "This is one single example, for sure. There is too much waste in the world, and this is not a problem that we can solve on our own. But this is a great example to showcase there are solutions already in place and the chemical industry can support that."

R&D investments

The company is investing about $109.2 million (€100 million) in its global R&D infrastructure and assets. Covestro is updating its laboratories in Leverkusen, Germany, with automated systems and new digital capabilities.

"[Customers] are enabling us to expand and maintain our innovation pipeline," Sucheta Govil, chief commercial officer at Covestro, said in an Oct. 8 news release. "By this, we are the go-to partner for more sustainable solutions which help to meet the climate-neutrality targets of our customers. Thanks to this global innovation booster, we come even closer to our joint goal to become fully circular."

"Simulations of chemical processes are a key element in the development of recycling technologies and research on new molecule classifications," Torsten Heinemann, head of group innovation and sustainability at Covestro, said in the release. "Laboratory digitalization enables test data to be recorded in higher quality and to a greater extent than is usual in analogue ways."

"These laboratories drive, among others, application technology for coatings and adhesives in core industries like automotive and construction, but also special areas such as light guiding applications as well as medical applications," the release added.

In the U.S., Covestro is investing in a series of modernization and technical upgrades across its Pittsburgh location. It's innovation center in Shanghai, China, received investments in infrastructure and digitalization.

Earlier this month, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. offered to acquire Covestro. The materials supplier said that action will not affect operations.