SPEAKER INTERVIEW

Steven Peleman is building a recycling plant in the NextGen District in the port of Antwerp to convert polyurethane foam from discarded mattresses, car seats and other sources into polyols for reuse in new polyurethane products. Rebuilding supply chains for the circular economy requires the spirit of Open Innovation. Steven will discuss this on the Circular Economy panel at the Foam Expo conference, 5-7 December in Stuttgart.

How did you get involved in the Circular Economy topic?
It's funny you should mention Open Innovation, because I actually worked on Open Innovation back around 2008. We worked on an Open Innovation platform with Henry Chesbrough and Wim Vanhaverbeke here in Belgium - Chesbrough coined the term Open Innovation at Berkeley Haas. Collaborative innovation, collaborative R&D, ecosystem value, network innovation, they are all related concepts. If you talk about the subject of circular economy, by definition you need this as a paradigm, because it's not a one-on-one. It's not about supplier-customer relationships. It's closing the circle ideally and looking for synergies.

Looking at my background, I started my career at Caterpillar Engineering. I worked in construction at Husky Injection Molding Systems in Luxembourg, became responsible for R&D as well and then we established the Open Innovation Center and TomorrowLab in Brussels. Huntsman then asked me to have a look at their innovation pipeline and realign that with their strategy. That is how I rolled back into chemicals and materials engineering.

I am also a former ski racer. Because of that fact I have been in the mountains for over 35 years and seen the devastating effects of climate change. You can complain about it, be negative, protest, but it all doesn't help a lot. The best thing is to show an alternative. I started thinking, what would work? Consulting doesn't work, because you write reports on what someone else is supposed to do. You are sitting at the other end of the table.

I had a couple of ideas what would be the mechanics of how it could work. I wrote about it in the Journal of Business Chemistry in 2019. It was published in October and I started executing the idea early 2020, not knowing that Covid was gonna hit us. If you want to cut back on emissions and waste pollution, you make sure that as soon as something becomes end-of-life, you keep those molecules in the economy instead of becoming waste; material reincarnation at the molecular level to forego incineration or landfilling as the default solution.

And of course, the energy balance needs to be right and the business model needs to be there. That is where Open Innovation comes in. You can easily find business models where the additional cost that is sometimes part of the story is actually covered by a couple of new players that will have the benefit of being in this new value chain. The idea was to basically design and start a portfolio where we create company after company that tries to close material loops and the first one is naturally the industry we come from; the PU industry.

EU sustainability policy also has this goal to move away from incineration and landfilling, in particular for mattresses, furniture, and car seats. Were you directly responding to that?
Yes, but one very important aspect is that when we talk about material reincarnation, we talk about material classes. I am basically not interested in mattresses or car seats; I am interested in polyurethane foam. Of course, there is flex foam and rigid foam and some sources are easier to collect than others, but if you only do mattresses, you almost make it unaffordable to do the rest of the flex foam collection. Cherry picking would almost block the overall cleanup of PU foam. It’s the same with fridge waste. We know that they also have to come back into the value chain, which is going to be very difficult, but it needs to happen.