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Recycling Solutions for PVC Coated Fabric from Vinyl Council

Sandwich toaster inspires recycling solutions for PVC coated fabric

Four Monash University graduates have presented innovative early product concepts in a project first in Australia to find solutions for recycling PVC coated polyester fabric into new product. Commonly used in advertising banners, truck tarpaulins and grain covers, over 1.2 million m2 of advertising banner fabric alone goes to landfill in Australia every year. That's enough to cover the area of the Melbourne Cricket Ground 60 times.

Through funding support of the Victorian government as part of their Future Designers program, over 12 weeks, two Chemical Engineering and two Industrial Design graduates worked in partnership with the Vinyl Council of Australia (VCA) and local PVC manufacturers and recyclers to find potential solutions to the wastage of such a great material.

The students had a challenging brief - to find ways to economically reprocess the material into marketable product, and to showcase their concepts at an industry presentation in March. As with any business, they had to work from two ends: to process material with optimal efficiency and therefore minimise costs, yet meet the necessity to provide recyclate that could be made into useful, valuable applications.

The students started with approaches to destroy, reconstitute and reprocess the material. Early reprocessing ideas were inspired by a humble sandwich toaster, which led to work on high volume industrial granulators and roll heat presses. It is a difficult, composite material because of the polyester fibres, which would usually have to be separated and removed from the PVC, however, the students explored reprocessing the material without fibre extraction.

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