3M subsidiary Dyneon walks the sustainability walk

Fluoropolymers are used in a variety of industrial applications, such as oil and gas, chemical and petrochemical processing, automotive and aerospace or in the electric/electronics industries. Up until now, however, their fate at the end of their useful life has tended to be either incineration or landfill.

Sheer waste, says the company. Why throw away valuable  - and, as in the case of fluorspar, irreplaceable - raw materials, instead of keeping them in the value chain? Why go to the expense of incurring the ever-higher waste management costs associated with compliance with national and international environmental regulations, instead of concentrating on establishing a truly sustainable and responsible raw material handling process?

Working closely with its project partners InVerTec, a technology institute for applied research and development in the field of combined electrothermal treatment and process intensification, and Bayreuth University, Dyneon has now successfully developed a chemical recycling technology known as "Up-Cycling." This is a fluoropolymer depolymerizing process that enables some 90 percent of monomers to be recovered from perfluorinated polymer waste.

The fluoropolymer up-cycling process can be seamlessly integrated into existing infrastructure, says the company. Using pyrolysis, perfluorinated polymers are recycled into gaseous monomers with a very high recovery rate. These monomers are fed into the existing distillation plant, and simply returned to the regular production cycle, thus closing the fluoropolymer loop for the very first time.

Putting its money where its mouth is, Dyneon decided in 2012 that it would have to build a plant to demonstrate the process. Today, construction on a high-temperature recycling pilot facility for fluoropolymers is currently ongoing in Burgkirchen, Germany. The project has received funding from the Germany Environment Ministry to the tune of almost 1 million euros. Construction commenced in May 2013, and by December 2013, the shell of the building had been completed. Work is still in progress on the interior. The start up is planned for in the fourth quarter of 2014.

As Klaus Hintzer, 3M Corporate Scientist, pointed out: "There is no question that this project's technical challenges are enormous, but they are minimal in the light of the realization of what it means to the sustainability of fluoropolymers. And it's only the beginning."

The pilot plant will have a capacity of 500 tons a year. Initially, the plant will process fully fluorinated, polluted polymer scrap, such as PTFE, FEP and PFA. In the following step, it will process PTFE compounds containing different types of fillers.