NANOFLEX

The building and construction community in Europe includes about 150000 plumbing, heating, ventilation, air conditioning contractor SMEs with 1.2 million employees generating a total turnover of €130Bn. Our community faces the challenges of meeting the growing demand for plastic pipes and the EU Landfill Directive and the revised EU Waste Framework Directive. The polluter-pays principle says that the costs of waste management are to be borne partly or wholly by the producer of the product from which the waste came and the distributors of such products, who are our SME members. Under floor heating, radiator heating and plumbing systems accounting in total 1.7 million kilometres of new piping in Europe, of which 56%, namely 0.96 million km are plastic pipes. 46% of these plastic pipes are made of PEX, which due to its cross-linked nature is not recyclable. Recycling of multilayer pipes with encapsulated aluminium results in highly toxic by-products. About 3500 tonnes of scrap plastic pipes is disposed of in land fill due to the use of non-recyclable plastics. Our idea is the development of a universal flexible plastic pipe system suitable for under floor heating, radiator heating and drinking water distribution. We propose to develop a pipe without PEX, and without an integral aluminium layer to allow 100% of the pipe scrap to be recycled. We will achieve this by replacing aluminium or expensive EVOH oxygen barrier materials with innovative nanocomposites in combination with a redefined wrapping technology. The plumbing and heating contractors will benefit from selling a new innovative fully environment-compatible universal pipe system providing: savings in costs for storage, transportation, and logistics; improved work facilities (easy to install and bend); waste cost savings and CO2 emission savings. The project is expected to generate over €98 million in Europe within 5-year post-project time, including exports up to €300 million and creating an estimated 2000 jobs