Newsbilder

An illustration of the process for recovering zinc

Michael Heitzinger (Managing Director, Uremia) Christoph Wöss (Business Development Manager EREMA Group GmbH) and Patrich Rachinger (Product Group Manager, Erema) at the site of the new customer centre, where a VACUNITE system for material test runs is being installed. Photo: Erema

The new production halls of Starlinger in Schwerin, Germany. Photo: Starlinger

Material loops are also being closed by renewable raw materials. One example is the Rambutan program, which sources high-quality active ingredients from previously unutilized plant parts. BASF researchers discovered that active ingredients from the leaves, peel and seeds of the rambutan fruit have positive effects on skin and hair. In order to sustainably source the cosmetic ingredients, the company’s Rambutan program has established a socially and environmentally responsible supply chain with local partners in Vietnam and initiated the cultivation of the first two organically certified rambutan gardens in Vietnam.

In BASF’s ChemCycling project, plastic waste is transformed into pyrolysis oil using a thermochemical process. The oil can be fed in the BASF Verbund, replacing fossil resources. Using a mass balance approach, new products are manufactured with it. These have the same properties as products from fossil raw materials. BASF works together with partners such as Quantafuel, a start-up headquartered in Oslo, Norway. Quantafuel is specialized in the pyrolysis of mixed plastic waste and the integrated purification of the resulting oil.Rasmus Kærsgaard (left), Plant Director, Quantafuel, and Dr. Michael Bachtler (right), who is working on BASF’s ChemCyclingTM project, in Quantafuel’s pyrolysis and purification plant in Skive, Denmark. Photo: BASF

Due to the repeated use and processing of the plastics the polymer chains will be damaged so much that the plastic becomes brittle or yellowed. Additionally, the plastic waste is often made up of a mixture of different plastic types which cannot be separated from each other. Such mixtures of incompatible plastics have a significantly negative impact on quality.At BASF’s research scientists are working on developing additives that can specifically stabilize recycled plastics and improve their properties. This enables plastics to be mechanically recycled multiple times and and material loops can be closed more effectively and more often.Daniel Santoro, lab technician at the Application Center for Plastic Additives in Kaisten (Switzerland), compares the optical properties of a recyceld film with and without a stabilizer package. Photo: BASF

More and more electric cars are registered worldwide every year. At the same time, the raw materials for the batteries are limited and mining them is associated with negative environmental impact. BASF researchers at the Ludwigshafen site are therefore developing a new chemical process to recycle high-purity lithium from these batteries. This will also avoid waste and reduce the CO2 footprint compared to existing recycling processes.The recycling process creates a substance called “black mass,” which is further processed by lab technician Stefan Schleicher (left) and chemist Dr. Birgit Gerke (right). Photo: BASF