The company operates a large carbon fibre recovery plant in Coseley, West Midlands, in the UK. Whilst it continues to optimise the patented carbon fibre reclaiming process, the primary focus of the company is to develop and industrialise the conversion technologies to manufacture recycled carbon fibre products that can be reintroduced to the composites and compounding industries.

Inside Composites: ELG has been recycling carbon fibre now since 2011. In your presentation at the recent Go Carbon Fibre conference in Munich, you observed that carbon fibre recycling is an industry whose time has come. Why now?

Marco Gehr: One major reason is that the transportation sector is looking to adopt carbon fibre composites to a significant extent, and the very positive benefits that recycled products can contribute. If you look at the life-cycle trade-offs that are involved in making the switch from metals to new carbon composites in the first place, the savings are all late in the use phase, with a significantly negative impact both in the production of carbon fibre and at end of life, assuming the composites are not recycled...

Read the full interview on our Inside Composites website