Ensuring Circularity of Soldier Personal Protection Equipment

ongoing

UTILE project aims at developing and demonstrating several technologies that allow the implementation of circular strategies to recover and reuse of different soldier personal protection equipment (SPE) used by the different European national armies. These technologies will be clustered into three, i) Digital tools that allow the tracking of materials flows in the supply chain and to support in the stakeholders of the value chain in taking the proper decision. ii) Technologies that let the upcycling of current SPE products (mechanical and chemical recycling) exploring also new uses of the materials recovered for different application in the defence sector. iii) Technologies that help to reduce the environmental impact during the manufacturing process by fostering the use of more ecofriendly processes and sustainability by replacing petrol based materials by biobased ones. UTILE innovations have high disruptive potential: bio-based resins for recyclable fibre composites, novel aramid fibre carding and spinning processes for recycled yarn production, innovative UHMWPE defibration, filament production and 3D printing technologies, novel pre-preg production employing bio-based resin and recycled aramid fibres. These will be demonstrated in 3 case studies. In parallel to this technological and material innovations, UTILE is developing a digital platform including artificial intelligence (AI)- based Decision Support Systems (DSS) and blockchain technologies for traceability, as well as circularity, environmental and costbenefit analysis (CBA) considerations in order to provide a holistic circular approach at EU level to the SPE value chain. The aim of the platform (named EU-level Circular Management System, EUCMS) is to foster the development, implementation, demonstration and validation of circularity concepts, first to the SPE value chain, but with the potential and intention to be transferred to other value chains in the Defense market.