NATURAL FIBRES AND FILLERS | MATERIALS
Polymers reinforced and functionalised with bio-based materials are growing more popular. Jennifer Markarian reports on performance-enhancing additives based on lignin, hemp, cellulose and other natural products
Earth story: innovations in natural fibres and fillers
Fibres and particles sourced from wood and plant by-products or waste, as well as from agricultural crops, have long been used as fillers and reinforce- ments in thermoplastic compounds. They have often been called wood-plastic composites or natural fibre composites and now are sometimes called biocomposites. Today’s pressure to reduce product carbon footprint by using renewably- sourced materials is fuelling further development of these “natural” fibres and fillers. Ford, for example, has conducted research on
natural fillers for automotive plastics for decades and has brought multiple projects to commercial use. The latest research project by Ford engineers in Cologne, Germany is the COMPOlive project, which sourced waste material from olive groves in Andalusia, Spain. A compound made from 40% olive tree fibres and 60% recycled PP was used to
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injection mould a footrest for the Ford Focus that reportedly worked well once optimised. Heartland Industries, headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, US has begun producing commercial quantities of its Imperium product, an engineered hemp-fibre, carbon-negative additive for reducing carbon footprint of thermoplastics and other materials. The company’s first industrial-scale processing facility is now in operation, located in Michigan. The operation went live in time for its first large-scale hemp harvest in 2023. Heartland produced approximately 5m lbs of Imperium filler to fulfill commercial contracts for the coming year. The company is planning rapid scaleup from this first facility – in 2023 the company had contracted with farmers for 2,100 acres of hemp farmland and in 2024 expect a harvest of 14,000 acres across four states (Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee
Main image: Lignin is used to make UPM BioMotion renewable functional fillers
May 2024 | COMPOUNDING WORLD 15
IMAGE: UPM
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