BASF advances chemical polyurethane recycling

by Craig Bettenhausen

July 4, 2020 | APPEARED IN VOLUME 98, ISSUE 26

Credit: BASF BASF plans to convert polyurethane foam mattresses back into the polyol (brown bottle, left) from which they’re made.

In a lab in Brandenburg, Germany, BASF researchers are turning polyurethane mattress foam back into its polyol starting materials. It’s easy to sort mattresses out of waste streams but not to recycle them. That combination makes mattresses an attractive target for BASF’s drive toward circular supply chains, says technical project manager Arno Volkmann. The firm expects to have pilot quantities of recycled polyol later this year. BASF says it is also working to recover diisocyanate, the other major foam component.