Silicone Recycling Process

A virtual tour of our...

Silicone Recycling Plant

Welcome to Parkersburg, West Virginia! This is where the magic happens, where chemistry is helping to give silicone rubber scraps that would have been landfilled or incinerated a second life for use as silicone oil. To begin this tour, take a look at the picture above. This is the main section of our recycling facility where silicone rubber is broken down into basic building blocks and then rebuilt or "polymerized" into silicone oil. Below, we take you step by step into the latest, technological breakthrough in silicone recycling.

The first step is...

Collection

Before we get into how silicone rubber is broken down, the first step and possibly the hardest part of silicone recycling is sourcing and figuring out the logistics involved in collection. The plant doesn't run unless we have feed stock, enough of it to keep up with the high demand for our eco-friendly silicone fluids.

A majority of the silicone we collect for recycling is "pre-consumer". These come directly from manufacturers and include damaged or off-spec finished products, trims or runners from the extrusion process, or any left-over, unused raw materials that are no longer needed or may have expired.

While we do not actively collect "post-consumer" materials, we are speaking with multiple waste management companies to start pilot collection programs in various cities across the USA.

Currently, we collect and recycle more than 500 metric tons of silicone rubber on a monthly basis!

The next step is...

Breakdown

As silicone rubber resembles other rubber and plastic types, careful inspection of the incoming streams for recycling is essential. Any non-silicone material must be removed as this will affect the overall recycling process. After inspection and sorting of silicone rubber by grades, the feed stock is ready to be broken down.

You've arrived at the mechanical breakdown station where our heavy duty shredding machines tear the rubber apart with large rotating knives. As silicone is notoriously difficult to cut through, items like silicone tubing needs to pass through our shredders multiple times. See the shredding process in real life in the video below!

The small silicone rubber pieces are now ready for chemical breakdown. This is a complex process that takes several hours to complete within a chemical reactor. While we cannot show you how this works on video, this process includes adding special catalysts, heating and stirring until the silicone rubber is broken down into basic, chemical silicone chains in liquid form.

The next step is...

Purification

After the breakdown process, silicone rubber that was in solid form has now turned into a clear, water-like liquid composed of a mixture of various silicone building block types. There are also small amounts of non-silicone impurities inside that need to be filtered out.

The purification takes place both chemically and mechanically. The liquid is pumped back into our chemical reactors where silicone chains are reshaped and aligned using chemical reactions. This process unifies and prepares the silicone blocks to be rebuilt or polymerized.

The liquid now goes to our filtration stations where activated carbon and high-mesh filters are used to removed micro-sized impurities. At the end of this purification process, the resulting liquid is crystal clear, odorless and ready to be made into silicone oil.

The last step is...

Making Silicone Oil

You've made it to the final phase of the silicone recycling process. In this step, the clean liquid containing silicone building blocks are rebuilt or polymerized into silicone oil. As this is also a chemical process, the liquid is again pumped into a chemical reactor where special catalysts are added, heated and stirred.

As this happens, individual silicone blocks start to connect to each other making long, linear silicone chains. The longer the chains become, the more viscous the silicone oil will be. There's a lot more science that goes on here to control the viscosity of each batch. Let's leave this to our chemists to figure out.

We have made silicone oil! The entire process is pretty amazing right? The silicone oil is allowed to cool and is packaged and shipped out to manufacturers all over the world to make new products. A small portion of the silicone is filled into bottles and sold on this website!