Michelin-led WhiteCycle consortium launches

WhiteCycle, a project coordinated by Michelin, officially got underway on 1 July with the aim of developing a circular economy for converting complex waste containing plastic textiles into high-added-value products. Co-financed by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe programme, this public/private European partnership includes 17 organisations.

An ambition that WhiteCycle holds is to, by 2030, foster the annual recycling of more than 2 million tonnes of PET, the third most widely used plastic in the world. This project should make it possible to reduce CO2 emissions by approximately 2 million tonnes and to avoid the landfilling or incineration of more than 1.8 million tonnes of plastic each year.

Composite industrial waste containing textile (PET) and other components from tyres, hoses and multilayer clothes at the end of the product lifecycle – which is currently difficult to recycle – could soon become recyclable. That material could go into producing new plastic for tyres, hoses and clothes.

WhiteCycle partners

Industrial partners: Michelin, Mandals, Inditex

Waste management: Synergie TLC, Estato

Intelligent sorting: Iris

Biological recycling: Carbios

PET processing: Kordsa

Product lifecycle analysis: i-Point

Research: Pprime, Université de Poitiers, DITF, IFTH, Erasme, HVL

Business cluster: Axelera

Project management: Dynergie

The consortium will establish the new processes required for various steps in the value chain:

Sorting technologies that make it possible to considerably increase the plastic content of complex waste streams in order to better process them;

A pre-process for recuperated plastic, followed by a very innovative recycling process (using an enzyme) which sustainably disintegrates the pre-processed plastic into pure monomers;

Repolymerisation of the resulting plastic monomers to produce like-new plastic;

Quality verification of the new products made with the plastic resulting from recycled complex waste.