According to Composites UK, the project was set up with the WorldSailing Trust and aimed at using Lineat’s aligned formable fiber technology (AFFT) to recycle broken carbon fiber sport components for use in similar applications.
The technology breaks composite products such as tennis rackets, bike frames, masts and ski-poles into small 3-10mm chips, recovers the (now short) fibers and re-aligns them into new uni-directional tapes.
The marine and sports industries use an estimated 15 ktonne of carbon fiber every year, making it the third biggest user of carbon fiber by volume. However, these components often only have a short lifetime of less than three years, giving sport a large carbon footprint, the company said.
