Carbon fibre recycling slashes disposal costs
A
Brookhouse Holdings product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Sep 13, 2007
All of Brookhouse's waste carbon fibre off-cuts are picked up free-of-charge and taken for recycling.
By recycling waste carbon fibre laminations, Brookhouse has eliminated a significant disposal cost, while ensuring that it adheres to its environmental management policy.
Brookhouse has recently achieved ISO14001 environmental certification for its Darwen manufacturing site.
The company's environmental management programme covers all aspects of its operations and a major activity within the programme is waste minimisation and recycling.
An important production stage in the manufacture of composite components at Brookhouse is the development of multi-ply, pre-preg carbon fibre laminations, which are then cured at high temperature and pressure in autoclaves.
Often this development task must be carried out manually using master models and mould tools.
Naturally, it is a very time-consuming operation and can often produce wastage of expensive pre-preg material.
Brookhouse addressed this problem some time ago by investing in automated ply cutting, where the machine software can plan cutting operations so that individual pre-preg templates can be nested within rolls of material.
This allows complete sets of templates for components to be manufactured and, by better material utilisation, can save up to 10% in material costs.
However, there is still unavoidable material wastage and, formerly, this was transported off-site for incineration at an annual cost of GBP 38,000.
However, investigation revealed that carbon fibre materials were being recycled by a UK company.
Contact was made, an assessment of the waste material was carried out and now all waste carbon fibre off-cuts are picked up from Brookhouse free-of-charge and taken for recycling.
As a result, the company does not have pay the annual disposal charge and a valuable material is able to be re-used.
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