JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #65 - May/June 2011 - 26

sustainability

Recycling materials from scrapped ski equipment
Skis are multi-material products (metallic & organic) that have forever presented end-of-life problems in mountainous regions. The Tri-Vallées company recently came up with an original response to this problem, which may well be extended to domains other than alpine skiing.
neighbouring departments). Tri-Vallées consequently took up the challenge and entered into a partnership with the Savoie Regional Council and the Ecole des Arts et Métiers (the Environment branch of which is situated at Savoie Technolac) in order to finance a feasibility study into end-of-life ski equipment recycling. This study, based on the premise that skis contain a multitude of compressed materials of different types and in different quantities according to the make, concluded that it was vital, when attempting to recover all or part of these materials, to use a grinder capable of reducing skis to a particle size sufficient for sorting the materials. Tri-Vallées therefore set out in mid-2005 to discover that rarest of birds: a grinder that was locally accessible in order to offer a solution for short recycling chains, while also being sufficiently powerful to grind materials that are themselves designed to be as robust as possible. By the end of the year this was a done deal: after unsuccessfully testing fifteen or so machines (the most powerful of which could barely slice up the skis into several pieces), the company signed a partnership with a waste processing business in the Albertville conurbation, whose grinding process yielded the desired particle size. The grinding process of this partner actually consists of a succession of serial-mounted grinders, upstream of which a shredder is installed. This grinding sequence reduces the used ski equipment to a particle size of approximately 1 cm in diameter at the end of the line, and some of the materials can be sorted. The scrap metal is thus extracted from the granulate by an overband (magnetic separator) installed above the conveyor belt. An induction system is then used to recover the non-ferrous metallic parts (essentially, the aluminium contained in the bindings). The rest of the granulate, consisting of a mixture of wood, glass fibre, epoxy, polyurethane, and all the

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GAUTHIER MESTRALLET SALES ENGINEER TRI-VALLÉES

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Industrial response to the needs of a community

This constituted a dual challenge for the Communauté de Communes: on the one

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n 2004, concerned at seeing every year the containers in its three waste recycling centres being filled up with scrap ski equipment thrown out by the professionals on its territory, the Association of local authorities ("Communauté de Communes") of the canton of Aime (France) asked TriVallées, a company based at Albertville and specialised in waste management, to try and come up with an alternative solution for treating these deposits, with a view to recycling all or part of them.

jec composites magazine / No65 May - June 2011

hand, this waste is produced by professionals and it is not the CdC’s responsibility to pay the processing costs; and on the other, the containers in which the scrapped equipment is deposited are destined for landfill, an outlet that offers no possibility of recycling and that generates high transport costs (the Savoie department does not have a class 2 waste storage centre on its territory, and the waste is therefore transferred to

Since 1999, Tri-Vallées has operated in the Savoie department in all activities relating to the running of waste recycling centres, and the collection, sorting, disposal, processing, transformation and packaging of waste or similar products. The company provides services to private individuals, companies, public authorities and local authorities, in the framework of a global sustainable development approach. The company has been ISO 14001-certified since 2007, and its objective is to acquire MASE certification in April 2011. The turnover of the company, which employs 95 people, has been in constant growth since its creation. In order to associate its employees with the life and decisions of the company, Tri-Vallées changed its legal status in 2007 to become a SCOP (Société Coopérative Ouvrière de Production – "Workers' Cooperative").
JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #65 - May/June 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #65 - May/June 2011
