Worn Again Technologies, a polymer recycling technology firm, has announced the launch of its new pilot R&D facility located at CPI, a technology and innovation centre in Redcar, England.
The pilot plant is designed to validate and develop Worn Again Technologies’ proprietary process which separates, decontaminates and extracts PET polymer and cellulose (from cotton) from non-reusable textiles and PET bottles and packaging to go back into supply chains as raw materials to become new products as part of a continual cycle.
The purpose of the plant is to develop further process data, knowledge and understanding to enable the business to set the technical parameters and scale the engineering design, as a step to industrialisation.
The team, coordinated by Worn Again Technologies’ Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Adam Walker, began working with CPI on the commissioning of the pilot in Q4 2019.
The apparatus will be run with a rigorous, disciplined scientific process to meet the needs of the market and customers’ high expectations. Experimentation will include testing of the process using various inputs to understand the yield and quality impact on the product.
Nick Ryan, Worn Again Technologies’ Technology Director, explained: “The pilot is a significant step in developments as it will allow us to confirm and further optimise the different steps in the process in one unit, accelerating our engineering development to the next step of a demonstrator plant.”
Cyndi Rhoades, Founder of Worn Again Technologies, said: “It is exciting to have progressed our developments from lab to plant. While there is still a long road ahead, it’s the next tangible step getting us closer to a scalable, commercially viable industrial process that will enable the move away from using finite virgin resources to the circularity of raw materials.”