How rethinking design shapes the future of sustainability for composites
In the pursuit of sustainability, the most impactful choices are made long before production begins. Green initiatives like recycling and minimizing waste are valuable; however, evaluation of the value and lifetime of a product is often overlooked. Questioning these ideas can determine whether a product should be produced at all, the materials required, and where it will be in 50 years’ time. Here, Tiina Uotila, technical sales manager at Exel Composites, discusses how circularity challenges can be addressed at the design stage.
Circularity presents an alternative to the typical linear ‘take-make-dispose’ model by focusing on reusing, repairing, and recycling to maximize a product’s lifecycle. Fundamentally, circularity recognizes that resources should be used wisely to maintain value across its entire lifetime.
Reducing dependence on virgin raw materials is also a key aspect of circularity. Composites manufacturing is steadily making progress towards embedding sustainability across production, with more developments expected over the coming years.
Awareness of circularity is growing through strong leadership. Over 80 per cent of composites manufacturers are developing a sustainability strategy. Embedding this culture across organizations ensures circularity becomes second nature. This shared responsibility becomes crucial at the design stage, where many influential decisions are made.
Sustainable actions and circularity can be improved across all stages of composites manufacturing, but shifting the focus to the design stage can help minimize waste and maximize energy savings later on. Embedding circularity into design can influence material choice, production methods, product lifetime, and overall worth. Questioning these aspects can identify whether you need to rethink your design and if it should even be made at all.
Altering design choices for longevity
Within the early stages, engineers decide not only how a product will perform but also how long it will last and what will happen to it at the end of its first life. Composite structures remain in service for up to 50 or 60 years, meaning that decisions made today will shape the environmental impact of a product on our children’s and grandchildren’s world. Designing for long product lifetime therefore becomes one of the most effective sustainability strategies available for manufacturers.
Simplicity is also an important but often overlooked design element that can impact a composite profile’s recyclability. In hybrid composites, for example, product specifiers must weigh up the cost and performance advantages that fiber combinations offer versus long-term recyclability issues, as these components are difficult to separate once bonded.
Material traceability is closely linked to simplicity. As with hybrid profiles, legacy composites offer disposal challenges as their components are unclear. Many modern recycling methods currently under development require detailed information regarding fiber, resin chemistry, and additives, yet older composites reach the end of life with little documentation.
To maximize circularity, manufacturers must embed traceability into the design process so future recyclers can properly identify products.
Focusing on material choice
Changing material choices and usage can create tension across the composites manufacturing industry, which aims to deliver high-quality performance in very specific, demanding applications. This includes wind turbine spar caps, which strengthen blades and allow them to reach more than 100 meters, power transmission conductor cores that increase transmission capacity by up to 50 per cent, and telecommunications radomes that can be both RF-transparent and opaque.
The concern for manufacturers is rarely performance related; it is most often linked to cost and availability of materials. Recycled or bio-based materials will often achieve the same performance, but can carry a surcharge compared to fossil-derived fibers and resins. In this context, circularity becomes a commercial decision as much as a technical one, requiring manufacturers to balance sustainability targets against cost pressures and long-term supply security.
Broadening circularity methods and finding second life
Focusing solely on recyclability can also narrow circularity to one method. Recycling is an important pathway, but it represents one stage in a much broader lifecycle. Refusing unnecessary products, rethinking design concepts and decisions, reducing material use, reusing materials and components, and repairing damage also shrink energy and virgin resource consumption.
For example, replacing heavier metals with lightweight composites can significantly reduce energy expenditure during decades of operation, which can have a bigger effect than a trickier disposal pathway.
When composite products can no longer be restored for their initial purpose, their strength and durability make them useful for secondary uses. While there is no infinite supply of applications for decommissioned wind turbine blades or radomes, adapting to a mindset that encourages multiple lifecycles for composites will help embed plans for circularity from product conception.
Striving for circularity places new demands on engineers to balance. Without common guidelines and shared best practices, sustainability will remain a concept rather than an integral part of everyday production. Increasing awareness of sustainability goals at all levels of an organization is essential to embed circularity and ensure it becomes standard practice.
Looking ahead, recycling infrastructure is continually improving, and its outputs are likely to become more widely available as raw materials. However, circularity in composites will not be achieved through recycling alone. It will depend on better designs, created earlier, by engineers who truly understand the lifetime impact of the product and material traceability.
Exel is among expert manufacturers who must forge connections with other essential parts of the value chain, as technologies, regulatory, and political pressure, and product usage will continue to advance. Ensuring these connections are strong will streamline a cohesive approach to the challenge of sustainability.
