Winter Industry's New Technologies for Ski Equipment Recycling

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Winter sports industry is a critical sector for the EU: in 2022, 4.8 million pairs of skis were produced within EU countries, with a growth of 37% over the previous year. Similar numbers are found in the production of ski boots, where 98% of the 3.5 million pairs produced annually are made in Europe, allowing the EU to position itself as a world leader in the ski equipment manufacturing industry, representing excellence in the global competitive environment. Despite the positive figures, ski gear high production volumes are associated with a critical issue: the end-of-life management of ski products (once they have reached the end of their usable lifespan after about 150 days of use) which must be replaced. This is a critical problem, considering the massive volumes of products to be handled and the lack of technological solutions, leading to disposal in landfills or incinerators with no resource recovery. This scenario contributes to increase environmental impacts of the industry sector. The lack of technology is due to the complex composition of the equipment, which consists of multi-materials (polymers, wood, etc.) very difficult to separate when assembled in the final product. In this context, LIFE re-WINTER represents a key turning point for ski gear industry, as it proposes an effective solution to reverse the linear life cycle by developing a circular model based on innovative recycling technologies, targeting post-consumer skis, bindings and ski boots directly collected from the market. The project will develop innovative industrial-scale plants for the separation of the different materials of which the target ski gear is composed through the action of selective dissolution and mechanical recycling (already demonstrated at pilot scale), specifically tailored on the single product features. In this way, it is possible to recover, without quality drop, the main materials and reuse them back in the production of the same equipment with no performance loss.