Introduction to Carbon Fibre Circularity
Francesco De Lieto: Welcome back to Raw Green. Francesco De Lieto and Emma Mee here. Carbon fibre is one of the most important materials in modern engineering. It makes airplanes lighter, electric vehicles faster, and wind turbines stronger. There is a problem. Producing carbon fiber is extremely energy intensive. Manufacturing can generate huge amounts of waste and at the end of life, these composites are notoriously difficult to recycle. So, can one of the most advanced materials in the world actually become circular? Today, we’re speaking with Gary Owen from Lineat, a company developing technologies to recover and reuse carbon fiber at industrial scale. Gary, welcome to Raw Green.
Emma Mee: So, carbon fiber seems like the perfect material for modern engineering. It’s light, strong, durable. There’s a clue in the name, but structurally it’s one of the hardest materials to recycle.
Why Carbon Fibre Is Hard to Recycle
Emma Mee: What exactly makes it so difficult?
Gary Owen: Well, it’s in its inherent manufacturing process, you’re talking of temperatures of north of 1500°C. Wow. So, when you put them through a normal kind of recycling process, nothing happens to them. So, it’s not like a metal where you can melt it down to the raw material. You’re left with the fibers. So, it’s it’s a difficult material to to recycle and particularly from the energy perspective, you’re putting a lot of energy in it to try and reclaim it.
Francesco De Lieto: So, are companies trying to recycle carbon fiber because of sustainability goals or because landfill restrictions and disposal costs are becoming a problem?
Gary Owen: I think a combination of both Francesco to be honest because you know we we the sustainability side is fantastic but we should also look at the economics. It’s a very wasteful material. When you manufacture the raw fiber at the beginning you’ve got a 10 to 15% wastage. When you manufacture a component say a wheel you could have up to 35% wastage in off-cuts and then as you said at the end of it at the end of life you can’t recycle it. So from pure economics going through the manufacturing process, you should be looking to try and re-put this back into the supply chain somehow because it is a very expensive material.
Emma Mee: It is. So what are the biggest technical barriers preventing large-scale recycling today, Gary?
Gary Owen: Well, as we touched on there, the components that it goes into are so varied. So from airplane wings to bike frames to ice hockey sticks, everything has got carbon fiber in. So all those different shapes if you reclaim. So recycling of carbon fiber is a two-step process. You have the reclamation where you take the resin out. So the resin and the fibers, you take the resin out so you’re left with the fibers. And then there’s a recycling using of these reclaimed fibers. Once a part has been reclaimed, you can imagine the fibers in a tennis racket are different than in a cycle wheel, different than in an airplane, different from Northvolt. So you’ve got lots of different sizes, shapes, lengths of fibers. So I think that’s where our process comes in because we have a continuous short fiber.
The Hidden Waste in Carbon Fibre Manufacturing
Gary Owen: So kind of obviously more on their continuous short fiber, but we have the same length fiber. So all those variables get chopped down to a 5 mm or 6 mm length and then we can use them. Where when they’re reclaimed, you can’t really use a meter long and a 4 mm fiber together. They’ve got to be in the same format. And that’s kind of where our process comes in.
Emma Mee: Why do they have to be in the same format?
Gary Owen: Well, as you can imagine, if you’ve got something that’s 2 m long, say from an aircraft wing, and then you’re trying to mate it with a tennis racket, which might have a 50 mil fiber, it’s difficult to combine the fibers together. The easiest one, which a lot of people talk about, is the reclamation and reuse of the high-pressure vessels because it’s a filament-wound high-pressure barrel. So if you can take the resin off, you have a continuous fiber, but that’s in the future. That’s not now. Everything’s chopped up into small parts at the moment. So you can imagine an airplane wing to align those fibers in the strict manner they’re being designed in. There’s lots of small offcuts, triangles, rectangles, whatever, all in a big mass that has to be somehow formatted so we can go through a process. So currently the recycled material that is available is chopped up into a random mat. So, it’s not a very high specification material. You kind of lose a lot of the original unique properties of carbon fiber.
Emma Mee: So, I just want to jump in at this point because you’re making it actually sound a lot more diverse than I was aware of. For people who don’t work with these composites every day, Gary, tell me actually what actually is carbon fiber and why is it so strong? Where do the material properties come from?
What Carbon Fibre Actually Is
Gary Owen: Well, you can imagine it it’s carbon. It’s the base atom of everything around us. Pure carbon. Now, you must have heard everybody’s talking about graphene, the ultimate material. And that is a single atomic layer material which is even though people say it’s a fantastic material, it’s not actually usable because it’s in such a small one-layer atomic layer thick. Whereas carbon is a combination there. So it’s basically a usable version of graphene in its form. So it’s a yarn. It’s extruded as a yarn. So if you think like a polyester yarn that you get in your garments or or even wool. So it’s a yarn and that’s woven together or or in some formats put through what we call a unidirectional. So a continuous yarn in one direction and that’s then designers will take the specifications of that material and design that into the components.
Francesco De Lieto: So what are the biggest misconceptions that people have about carbon fiber and particularly around sustainability Gary?
Gary Owen: Well, I think I think Francesco kind of mentioned that at the very beginning because it’s lightweight. You think you’re saving and it’s kind of its dirty secret that it’s very difficult to recycle. So, everybody’s jumping not on the bandwagon, but saying carbon fiber is going to revolutionize aerospace and automotive. You know, it’s going to lightweight cars so they can go further with electric, which everybody’s forgetting about. One, it’s a very expensive material. Two, it’s quite wasteful, and three, you can’t recycle it. So, they’re kind of ignoring those factors a little bit and saying, “This material’s brilliant. It can, you know, halve the weight of an electric vehicle wheel, so it’ll go further. Isn’t that good?” Yes, but yeah, so I think people forget that a lot when they come up with a material and it’s it hasn’t been around for that long, carbon fiber. I think that’s why, you know, there’s not been that much work done on the reclamation and recycling of it. We’re still early stages really.
Why Demand for Carbon Fibre Is Exploding
Francesco De Lieto: The reality though it is that there is an explosion in the use and consumption of carbon fiber. The demand it has skyrocketed. I was reading some data that between 2010 and 2023 consumption of carbon fiber increased 168%. And could grow another further 100 plus% by 2030. So the demand it is there and obviously given what we said as of now about the wasteful manufacturing practices and the non-circularity of the product there is a dramatic need for solutions. Can you break down a little bit how Lineat works?
Gary Owen: So Lineat Composites is a recycling company. So we take reclaimed waste carbon fiber and we’re trying to be as agnostic as possible. You can imagine at the beginning with a business it’s very difficult. You find a fiber you like and you stick to it but we’re trying to be as agnostic as possible. So when I mentioned before that recycling of carbon fiber is a two-step process. You have the reclamation. So take an example a bike frame. So a bike frame is made up of carbon fiber, lots of bits of metal, which is difficult, and resin. Resin is holding those fibers together. So somebody’s got to take all the metal bits off. And then that frame will then go through a process, either pyrolysis, which is heat, solvolysis, which is chemical, or press, which is superheated steam. That gets rid of the resin. Those three systems are probably covered by about 20 companies around the world. It’s nothing new. Pyrolysis is used for reclaiming of tires, everything like that. So there’s lots of feedstock people. So we work alongside these reclaimers and we get the waste fibers.
How Lineat Recycles Carbon Fibre
Gary Owen: And as I said before, our process is—and some people hate it when we say this—is an advanced paper-making process. Right? So, with paper, you mix fibers in water. You try and make them as random as as possible. And then you suck out the water, you dry the paper, and you have a product. What we do with our fibers, we mix them in water. And we try to disperse these fibers. If you can imagine, they’re between 4 and 6 mm long and they’re 7-micron diameter. So, extremely smaller than the hair on your head. We disperse those so there’s not two fibers together. So individual fibers. We then bring them back together again through our kind of alignment patented process and we make an aligned material as opposed to a random orientation, which means it can be reintroduced further up into the supply chain. So adding value to the waste but also being used in more high-spec components back to where it was.
Gary Owen: To give you an example, back when we first started, we did a circularity project with World Sailing and we looked at four different sports. Tennis was one of the ones that worked out superbly. It was amazing. So we took broken tennis rackets, Lawrence our CTO and myself, we cut them down to size. We sent them off to be reclaimed. That process was a press, so superheated steam. They extracted the resin, sent the fibers back, we made a tape, Lawrence flew over to America, went to the Wilson R&D center and made a tennis racket. So really completing the whole complete circularity. So showing that end-of-life can be good. We at the moment concentrate on industrial waste because you know we know that end-of-life is a kind of the golden chalice at the end of the rainbow. It’s what everybody wants to focus on. It’s what everybody wants to hear about. However, as I just mentioned, it’s a very wasteful material all the way through its production.
Francesco De Lieto: Yeah. Exactly.
Gary Owen: So we’re concentrated on that because it’s hundreds if not thousands of tons per annum.
Emma Mee: Why is it so wasteful, Gary? What’s going wrong there as to producing that much waste in the middle of the supply chain because this stuff’s not cheap?
Gary Owen: No, no, no. Exactly. I think because—and you know I’m not an aerospace composite engineer here, so all the people listening to this, please don’t go, “Oh my god, what’s he saying?”—because the fibers are in one direction or two directions in a normal woven material, you have to align those fibers with the loads in the component. So the designers lay up the material in a specific way and that’s why it is also quite a manual process. So, you’re laying up fibers in a 30° angle or a 45-degree angle or 20° angle to take the loads going through that component, whether it be a bike wheel, a wing of an A350 or a tennis racket. So, if they’re not going in that direction, they’re cut off and it goes into the bin.
Emma Mee: That’s interesting. So, they’re actually making the material according to its use from its initial component parts. They’re not just taking a sheet of carbon fiber and cutting it to size, so to speak.
Gary Owen: No, no, no. So, so normally material comes in 1 m wide, different grades in aerial weights ranging from very ultra-lightweight to 600 g square meter. Our material sweet spot is in the light end, so very formable. And then yeah they will cut it into all different shapes then manually place it into a mold for instance and that’s how you get the component.
Francesco De Lieto: All right interesting. Gary, if I want to give a practical example of the product that comes out from your process. If I am an Airbus, Jaguar Land Rover or a Formula 1 team, how could I use your product for what specific application?
Gary Owen: So as I mentioned the aerial weight of material varies from 10 g a square meter up to 600 or a thousand. In different applications, people lay up fabrics in a multi-ply orientation. So you might have lots of different layers of material, but if you’re trying to put down as much material in one go, that’s when you want the heavier materials. So, for instance, like boat building, you’re laying up quite thick layers of carbon fiber. So, you might use a 400 or 500 g material. Aerospace and not just Airbus. So, once it goes into space, I’ve forgotten the analogy now. I think it’s for every kilogram saved in space is a million. For every kilogram saved in an airplane, it’s 100,000. In a car, it’s 10,000, etc., etc. So the higher the spec the component the more people are very precise, but our material is a lightweight material by the way it’s produced.
Industrial Performance and Unique Properties
Gary Owen: But what we’ve been finding is that it has some quite unique properties and I think that’s the thing that drew me to this. You know I’m a—I don’t know what I call myself—a sustainable commercial. So, I’m driven by the sustainability and the environmental side, but I also want to make money. Yeah, and it has to make money. It has to be economical to use this material. And when I was speaking with the people that invented the process at Bristol University, it has some quite cool unique properties that mean yes, it’s sustainable, it’s been made from end-of-life components, but it’s extremely formable, so it can conform to some really complex shapes better than virgin carbon fiber can really. So all of a sudden that opens—you know the green door opens because everybody wants to talk about recycled products—but then it’s like wow okay these properties, that’s interesting. And another one of these is because of the short fibers, due to its short fiber orientation, it absorbs energy better than the continuous fiber. So it can reduce vibration, it can increase dampening. So all different sectors across aerospace, automotive, sports, that has an enhanced property. So that kind of drew me into this, I’d say. So that’s where people can use our material and it still holds the original strength and stiffness that you would expect.
Francesco De Lieto: That was exactly my question. So right across all the properties—stiffness, flexural modulus, tensile—all the different properties, it retains about on average 80% right across the board.
Gary Owen: So it’s still not as good. You know you wouldn’t use it in a primary structure in an airplane. Okay. Please don’t use it in a primary structure in a wing. But you would use it in a secondary or third level structure in a plane. You’d use it as interiors. Um, you know, in automotive you might use it as an interlayer, as a dampening interlayer. We’ve been working with a lot of sporting companies that definitely see a reduction in vibration in the tennis racket, the hockey stick, the bike wheel, the bike frame, which then translates to the person holding it. Yeah. So for instance in a tennis racket you might not get tennis elbow as much because it’s not transferring that load up into your elbow. So it’s it’s a really cool kind of process unique material.
Francesco De Lieto: Talking about sustainability let’s think let’s go for a second down the route of environmental impacts. If I want to compare the environmental impacts of a virgin carbon fiber versus one coming out from Lineat’s process, what are the differences?
The Carbon Footprint of Carbon Fibre
Gary Owen: So when we first started talking about this, you know, carbon fiber has a dirty secret and the fact it is not the best material to make anything from as far as its CO2 footprint. Because of the energy required to manufacture it in the first place, we’re talking between 30 to 100 kg of CO2 per kilogram of material made. People do forget that. So, the aerospace, which is a higher grade, it is up to the 60 or 70 kg of CO2 produced. When you’re talking about steel, which is less than two. Aluminium is six, and they’re looking at sustainable and recyclable aluminiums now, so that’s coming down. Our process sits around about—
Francesco De Lieto: You know your numbers. I’m so happy.
Gary Owen: It’s the only—that’s the only numbers I know, Francesco! He’s asked me for my birthday and that’s about it.
Emma Mee: But don’t give us your PIN number. No. What were you just about to say Gary? Lineat sits at what number?
Gary Owen: Lineat sits around about 2 to 3 kg, you jog really, but then remember you do have to add the reclamation process as well and that’s pyrolysis or solvolysis. But some of the latest pyrolysis and solvolysis systems are down at the 3 to 4, so it can sit just underneath aluminium right. And that’s why the automotive, high-end automotive, are looking at it. Because we all know that, you know, if you buy your Lamborghini or your Ferrari like we do, that’s got carbon fiber in. Yeah. But if you buy your, you know, your Ford, there’s probably not a lot of carbon fiber in. It’s very expensive, very wasteful, very slow to manufacture and also it’s got a high CO2 footprint. So if you’re trying to reduce the footprint of your product, be it a car or be it a TV, you need to look at alternative materials. But at the same time, you need to reduce the weight. The default material is carbon fiber because everybody knows it’s ultra ultra strong for its weight. So people just go, well, we’ll use carbon fiber. And then somebody says, well, what about its CO2 footprint? Yeah. And that’s where kind of ah right, and you either ignore that and just press ahead. But if you’re really focused on the sustainability, which a lot of the big companies are now and that’s their driving—they’ve made those commitments—recycled carbon fiber suddenly becomes usable.
Can Carbon Fibre Be Recycled Multiple Times?
Francesco De Lieto: What happens though if you want to keep your product in the loop? Can I recycle it again? Because aluminium for example, scrap aluminium from the 6 to 7 original kilograms of CO2 per kilo of product, when it goes back from scrap becomes 0.6 to 0.8 kg. So can we do the same? Can we re-put it back into the system?
Gary Owen: 100%. And as I said before, our process takes short fibers. So there’s a process to reduce the size. Once you’ve made a component out of our material, you’ve already got that material, that fiber the right size. So it just has to go through the reclamation process again and you have the fibers again. We can put them through our process again. We have managed to recycle it three to four times in the lab without any reduction in properties.
Francesco De Lieto: Oh, that’s attractive.
Gary Owen: And you can imagine that a lot of carbon fiber, like a plane, has a life of 40 years. So that’s quite a long time.
Francesco De Lieto: That’s extraordinary, Gary. That that is a game-changer though. It actually in a way it is fantastic that it is going to reuse that 40 or even more percent of waste that is generated during the normal manufacturing processes. On the other hand, it means that there might be an even more augmented production of carbon fiber because now you close the loop.
Gary Owen: Yeah. No, exactly. And I think what’s happened—and this was a number of years ago when the supply of carbon fiber, because more people are using it as you say it’s growing, I don’t know what the exact number is, it’s like 15% per annum—it’s growing and it’s being used more in wind turbine blades. So the longer the blade, the stiffer it is, and the stiffening piece is the carbon fiber within the glass fiber. Yes. So they’re using more and more carbon fiber in the renewable sector. Aerospace used to be the biggest user and I think—I’m sure there’ll be lots of numbers out next week at the JEC Composites Expo—I think wind turbine is taking over that as the main volume. Yeah. So therefore there’s a big amount of feedstock waste that’s going to be when they decommission these blades, sorry. There’s going to be a lot of carbon fiber around the marketplace. Oh yeah, huge. Lots of raw materials for you.
The Role of Carbon Fibre in EVs and Aerospace
Emma Mee: No, let’s stay in there then. So I can see the need for the large infrastructure projects, the wind turbines and the aeroplanes, things as you say that hang around for sort of 40 years or so. But I can certainly also see the need in other sectors as you’ve mentioned with cars and automotive particularly when we’re moving to EVs. Lightness is key. But also sort of consumer goods and things as well. When we look at our phones and our laptops, you know, all this stuff needs really good rigidity and durability, but at the same time to be light and easy. So, what other sectors and companies and markets are you talking to, Gary, where you see opportunity?
Gary Owen: So, we’re actually talking—first of all, we started with the sports. Everybody loves speaking to sporting companies. They’re very quick to get product or test out there. They’re very innovative. They’re not really constrained by regulation or legislation. They can do whatever they want really. You know, if a tennis racket breaks, it’s not a big problem. If a wing falls off a plane, probably quite a big problem. Yeah. So therefore, we are our kind of low-hanging fruit with a lot of the sporting companies. So consumer goods. And it is interesting when you—it’s a good question actually—because when we first spoke with the sporting companies they weren’t looking at it from a sustainability angle. They were looking at it from “we can sell more product”. Realistically, if a tennis racket lasts 20 years, that’s really bad for the tennis company. They’ve got to be bringing out new products all the time to attract people. But with this, we can take the old ones. That’s fine. If they buy a new tennis racket every few years, if they think they’re going to play better—which we all know won’t make them play better, but let’s not go there. It will because it will soften their hits and that vibration.
Emma Mee: Yes, of course they will. Yeah. Well done. Good. Well listened. Yeah.
Gary Owen: And I think especially when you look at the economics, you know, when you’re say you’re manufacturing in Asia and you’re shipping millions of goods, whether they be sporting goods, electronics, whatever, every single one of those has a mass to it, a weight which has to be either shipped or flown around the world. If you can reduce that weight by a few grams, 5%, 10%, that has a massive knock-on effect onto the CO2 of the shipping as well. So all these things count. So we’ve been working with a couple of electronics brands, the sporting companies we’re speaking to—you know, we’re speaking to Bauer Hockey, we’re speaking to Wilson, Head, a lot of the top-brand bike companies—because the sustainability draws them in. Of course it does. Everybody wants to talk about sustainability, but it’s those unique properties where the engineers get involved. You know, the marketing people love the sustainability bit, but it has to be a viable material. It does the job. What I guess what we haven’t touched on, and maybe I’m jumping the gun here a bit, is the price.
The Economics of Recycling Carbon Fibre
Emma Mee: You’ve got to go around. No, no, no. So let’s talk about price. Okay.
Gary Owen: So you can imagine our biggest cost is our feedstock. It’s the reclaimed fibers. That is our biggest. It’s a paper process. We’re mixing these fibers in water, you know, fully automated. Our pilot line that I can hear humming in the background down below is being manned by one person. It produces material eight hours a day, five days a week. There’s not a lot of cost associated with that. We’ve got energy, yes, which of course goes up, but it’s that feedstock of reclaimed fibers and that, I’d say, is an issue at the moment because it’s not a commodity. Therefore, the price varies quite a lot. When there’s a lot of it, the price is low. When there’s not so much, the price is high. So, that it is. But we’re costing that we can be underneath virgin carbon fiber in kind of two to three years with scaling the machinery up. Which will allow people to use and you know, when you’re using lots of material, yeah, the price is very very specific. But what we found is that people are actually making a hybrid component. So they’re utilizing the special properties of our material with virgin carbon fiber. So if you want the ultimate—so you might lay up a component, six layers of virgin unidirectional to get the tensile strength and then you might use three layers of ours to maybe dampen the product or give a better surface finish and things like that. So the price is achievable. It’s down to our feedstock. But as we mentioned a minute ago, with things like wind turbine blades coming online, that feedstock is going to grow and grow and grow. So the price of that will start to come down.
Francesco De Lieto: And you also have regulations that should be playing in your favor, right? When we first met Gary, you talked to us about EU regulations where carbon fiber cannot be landfilled. For example, solve the problem.
Gary Owen: Yeah, that’s the point I was going to make, Francesco. I was going to jump on the—you jumped on the price bandwagon, but no, I was going to say legislation, especially in the bigger sectors, aerospace, automotive, they are looking into it because they’re being forced to look into it. Okay. And yeah, some certain countries in Europe, you’re not allowed to landfill carbon fiber. I think I’m right here—and please don’t contact us—but in the UK, you’re not allowed to landfill uncured carbon fiber and resin. You have to cure it. So if you’re manufacturing a component and you snip a bit of material off and that’s resin, you have to cure that resin in an oven before you can put it into the bin.
Emma Mee: Oh wow.
Gary Owen: It’s from an environmental perspective. If you’ve got chemicals in there that could seep into the ground. Particulates from the carbon fiber. Exactly. If they’re not cured. Once they’re cured, they’re solid. Not a lot will happen with that for tens, hundreds of years. So, yeah. But the legislation is becoming stronger and stronger.
Francesco De Lieto: Well, if you can arrive to market with an offer like that, it is a no-brainer. I was surprised to hear from you that your major cost it is actually the feed material, the reclaimed carbon fiber, because I thought okay this is a pain in the ass for manufacturers to deal with. I come as Lineat and say hey I solve the problem for you, give me your waste material I’ll handle it for you. So I was expecting not that to be your big cost like for example another recycling tech where they give away for free some sort of plastics or any other waste material.
Gary Owen: They do Francesco, right to the point where they say there’s a value with it and then they don’t give it away for free. Yeah, I’ve seen that right across all—you know when you—I remember a long time ago I worked with a company and they were making airbags. And they were cutting airbags out of a high heavy polyester material and the wastage was about 15% but they were making millions and millions of airbags. The company in question made more from the waste than they did from cutting out the airbags. Okay, until the person that they were doing it for said, “Please send the waste as well.” So they lost that. So there’s money to be made into that. But yeah, no, feedstock. What we’re trying to do to really complete that, we’re working with several of the OEM carbon manufacturers that have waste at the very beginning. They don’t know what to do with it. It doesn’t go into any of their product range at the moment. So we’re trying to take that waste and we’re working with Toray, Teijin, Hexcel, Syensqo, lots of the global carbon fiber manufacturers around the world, taking their waste, making it into our material and supplying it back to them.
Francesco De Lieto: Well, if you—yeah, I don’t know how big is your tank, but you can literally bring it to them, put it into a 20ft container and bring it to them on site and do that batch production. Just ideas.
Gary Owen: Yeah, no, that—I like the way you say 20 foot. It was a 40-foot container, the original idea, because it’s “factory in a box”, I think, is the buzzword about five years ago. That’s what everybody was throwing around. When you let your designers and engineers free, it doesn’t really work like that. They design it as it’s supposed to be. So, we—I’m sure we can fit it into a 40-foot container. But no, the idea is because as an environmentalist, sustainable driver, we shouldn’t be shipping waste carbon fiber halfway around the world. It should be where the waste is. So, yeah, in the future, we will have a plant next to a carbon fiber manufacturer. Their waste will go directly into it. Our product will then go back into their factory to either have a resin applied or combine with some of their virgin.
Francesco De Lieto: Beautiful. Like that a lot on site. Reduce that. You also reduce those building emissions to build your facility to do stuff because that will be packed into a 40ft container.
Gary Owen: And of course the accountants love it because you know there’s a waste in there that has a number sat next to it and if they can turn that into profit then good for everybody. Value.
Scaling Circular Composites
Emma Mee: So what’s next for Lineat? Well, you’ve now built your pilot plant, right? Which is able to produce how much per year? How many tons per year?
Gary Owen: The process that we have today in the pilot line down below is around about two to three tons a year. Okay, we’re just upgrading that to a new upgrade and I can’t really say too much, but it will allow us to do between 9 and 12 tons on the pilot line. And then it’s a matter of expansion. It’s about multiple machines and we also are working on an industrial scale because unfortunately it’s not a scalable process—it isn’t you know “copy paste make it 10 times bigger quicker”. There are limits to the technology. So, we’ve kind of found the limits with our pilot line first production machine, which is about 9 to 12 tons, which is adequate. And but for the big numbers, because there are hundreds of tons of waste out there just from manufacturing, let alone end-of-life. There must be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of tons. We have to have a process that can accommodate that. So, we’ve been developing, we just patented a new process which is different than the current process, which will allow us 10 times the production rate of that. Okay, wow. That’s kind of where we—so we’re trying to run at the moment to keep up with the market and demand.
Francesco De Lieto: What about the output quality? Will it still retain the same properties?
Gary Owen: Yes, that’s a really good question because you know people are used to looking at the carbon fiber and know exactly what the properties and also the quality is going through the whole production. Because our material is made up of between 4 and 6 mm fibers, you can see there’s going to be some variation in there. So we’re coming up internally and we have two large projects at the moment. One’s with JLR about scaling up our technology for the materials to go into the SUV range. And the other one is with GKN Aerospace and that is purely—our part of the project is looking at the quality control of our material and we’ve come up with some really cool inline processes, AI cameras looking at the alignment of the individual fibers, transferring that back to PC so we can look at the properties.
Francesco De Lieto: You told us a good story before, Gary, about JLR and the weight of the Range Rover going over.
Gary Owen: I think it’s a Range Rover. Yeah, I think this is quite a point. Everybody talks about sustainability, electric vehicles. Electric EV lithium-ion batteries are pretty heavy. So if you fill a Range Rover up with lithium-ion batteries to go fully electric because it’s such a large vehicle, it kind of goes over the, I think, 3 and a half thousand kilos, which then makes it a commercial vehicle. So all those lovely people driving around Chelsea tractors will have to go out and reset their licenses and get a commercial lorry driver’s license, an HGV license for their car. It’d be fantastic. There’ll be lots of school runs with high-vis jackets and beer bellies, but I do generalize lorry drivers there, so apologies for that. But yeah, so what do you do? How can you lightweight something? And as we said at the very beginning of the chat, carbon fiber is the default material just to say we use carbon fiber. Brilliant. End of, solved. Then you look at the CO2 footprint of virgin carbon fiber and say, “Well, we can’t because we’re currently using an aluminum at 6 kg and we’re looking for an overall footprint of that vehicle and tailpipe emissions, etc. We can’t go and use something that’s 40 kg.” So, that’s kind of where the interest in Lineat came. And yeah, we’ve got a really good relationship with Jaguar Land Rover. We’re looking to push on that and drive that forward.
Emma Mee: That’s fantastic. No, look, Green Angel Ventures is actually an investor in Lineat, so I do not want to distract you and I do want to keep you very much focused on carbon fiber, but indulge me this question, Gary, because I’m just curious as to the technology you’ve developed and what you’ve learned in this space. Are there other markets such as different fibers, basalt fibers, natural fibers or other kinds of recycled composites that could sort of be a future market for you?
Gary Owen: Well, the process in itself when it was developed at the university was to make hybrid materials. So, bringing originally I think it was glass and carbon together and get the ductile properties of glass in with the tensile strength of carbon fiber. That’s great in academia, they can spend years and years developing that, tweaking that to get the perfect material. We have run different fibers through our process— some of them I can’t really divulge—natural fibers probably not because it has to mix in water. So if you think about hemp, things like that, flax, they float. So yeah, I think specific modulus is below one, so it kind of floats, which is very popular in the boating industry now. Exactly. Yeah, no, we have another project with Greenboats of Germany and they make a lot of boats out of natural fibers, but what you’ve got there is it’s a really good product, but the specification and properties are not fantastic. So what people are doing—and we’re championing this—is mixing our fibers and their fibers up in a specific layup. So you get the strength of our material and you get the natural feel of their material as well. So interesting. But yeah, no, we are looking at lots of different fibers. In other industries, hydrogen fuel cells, they use carbon fiber for through-material conductivity. So it’s very specific as you say, basalt, ceramic fibers, all these. It’s just time, it really is. You know, the R&D team would love to start really going in deep into those, but when we have an interest from a customer or partner then we start. We are doing quite a stringent R&D work at the moment on different fibers.
Financial Viability and Conclusion
Francesco De Lieto: Very interesting. Thank you Gary. This is—it is very nice to hear that you can achieve both environmental and financial goals through your technology. Emma and I are advocating a lot that any climate tech needs to deliver on both. You cannot just go out in the market with good purposes, good environmental purposes. You need to deliver also on the financials otherwise the market—the PI—it is shrinking. The availability of funding for the PI it is there, but it is way more laser-focused on something that can deliver stuff. So I’m very happy to hear that you’ve got that in your hand.
Gary Owen: Yeah, and I think that that’s the driver. You know, my background’s commercial, my background’s sales, and it’s always driving that it has to be economical to use the material because when it’s just a sustainable green material, the first thing people ask is, “Is it cheaper?” And if it isn’t, if they’re not forced to do it by legislation, then they won’t do it.
Francesco De Lieto: Let me summarize it. There is no more green premium. There shouldn’t be any more green premium. Okay, you can accept it at the early stage of a technology because we are developing technologies and we bring it up to par. But when you are at that maturity stage, there shouldn’t be any more green premium. If not, there should be a green discount rather than a green premium. That’s how it should work.
Gary Owen: And I think that’s why having these kind of unique properties—dampening, vibration, formability—those are opening people’s eyes and going, “Okay, I’m not looking at this as a green material. I’m looking at it as a new material.” You know, when we’ve had meetings with kind of the Department for Business and Trade, it’s like “this is a new material.” They’re not saying it’s a green material. It’s a new material. And this has its origins back in the ’80s and ’90s when they were trying to develop a flexible and formable carbon fiber. It wasn’t invented to try and recycle; it was to try and develop the most formable carbon fiber. That’s one of its focal points. Nice.
Francesco De Lieto: Wonderful. Thank you, Gary. This was a lovely conversation. We have the time fly like crazy fast. Wow. Thank you very much for your time. Good luck with the next stage, next stages of your journey on with Lineat, and look to catch up with you again very soon.
Gary Owen: Definitely. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you. I’ll talk to you soon. Ciao. Bye bye.
Francesco De Lieto: Thanks for listening to this episode of Raw Green. If you made it this far, you probably enjoyed it. So don’t forget to hit subscribe and follow our podcast. It’s an awesome way to support our community. At OBI, we’re all about research, life cycle assessment, and green tech innovation. Stay in touch through our socials or visit our website. Links are ready for you in the description. Catch you in the next episode. Ciao.
