With global resource use and waste generation at an all-time high, the pressure on our planet is growing. Driving reuse, repair, and recycling is not only important for the environment, it is also key to reducing dependence on virgin raw materials and creating closed-loop systems across industries. Henkel is leveraging its world-leading expertise in material science to develop innovative adhesives that support circularity at every step in the value chain.
Success Story
Bonding for a circular future: How adhesive technologies support repair, reuse, and recycling
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The circular economy is a system where products and materials stay in the loop for as long as possible—which minimizes resource consumption and cuts waste. Switching from the current economic model of “take-make-waste” to this circular, regenerative system aims to decouple economic growth from the use of finite resources. Henkel is striving to enable circularity throughout its value chain by embracing the concept of the 9R Framework: Refuse, Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Refurbish, Remanufacture, Repurpose, Recycle and Recover.
The environmental need for circularity is clear: Closing energy and material loops not only helps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also avoids resource depletion, lowers the environmental strain caused by water and land use, and keeps materials out of the environment by addressing waste pollution. Next to this, businesses are demanding more circular solutions because of the rising focus on sustainability from consumers—and from regulators.
Comprehensive legislation is defining the path to circularity, especially in Europe. The Right to Repair directive and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), for example, aim to promote circular products that are designed to enable repair or reuse. Further regulations like the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) and the End-of-Life Vehicles Regulation are introducing Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and recycling targets to foster recyclability of products and support recycling infrastructure development.
Just as 80% of the emissions footprint of end products is determined in the design phase, so are their circular properties. Adhesives can play a crucial role in finding smart solutions for circularity: by providing high performance bonding during product life and contributing to closing the loop at end-of-life. That’s why adhesive experts are working closely with manufacturers from the very start of their product design processes.
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Our customers are partnering with us more closely than ever. By anticipating circularity regulations across industries we master design challenges, ensure the longevity of their products together, and position us ahead of legal requirements.
Benjamin Nummert, Senior Manager Industry Affairs
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Circular formulas and factories
Of course, circles have no start or endpoint. That means circular practices must be embedded in all business activities. At Henkel, scientists make sure circularity is at the heart of our portfolio by integrating recycled or bio-based materials into product formulas and packaging. Like the Rubson Energie PU foam range which combines 33 percent recycled material in the formula with 25 percet recycled metal in the can and 98 percent recycled plastic in the cap. Other Henkel products even contain captured CO2 emissions from the atmosphere.
Circularity is further integrated into the production processes at our factories worldwide. Our sites evaluate waste streams and develop methods to reuse or recycle materials, so that more than 80 percent of adhesive manufacturing facilities now send zero waste to landfill. Especially in water scarce areas, Henkel reduces the volume of freshwater and wastewater connected to our production processes by installing circular water systems. Like our production in Jundiai, Brazil, where we set up a water treatment plant to process rainwater for reuse in irrigation or sanitation.
Giving machinery a longer life
Outside its own facilities, Henkel is also enabling circularity at its customers’ sites. Our solutions for maintenance, repair and overhaul help to extend the lifetime of industrial equipment, which eliminates the need to replace parts or machinery. Henkel’s digital and AI-driven solution LOCTITE Pulse brings this to the next level by using sensors to monitor production processes and optimize maintenance so equipment stays in operation for longer.
100,000+
customers in more than 800 industries worldwide use innovations from Henkel Adhesive Technologies.
As a global leader in adhesives, Henkel has a powerful reputation for providing technologies that form reliable bonds—and our innovators are also developing solutions that debond on demand. This opens up a wide range of possibilities for circularity, like saving resources by separating, repositioning or reusing materials when errors occur during production or assembly instead of throwing away those parts as scrap.
How do adhesives get debonded?
Debonding can be achieved via various methods to enable repair, reuse or recycling at the end of a product’s useful life.
- Electricity: Electrodes are attached on both sides of the adhesive, upon applying a voltage, an electrochemical reaction causes debonding.
- Heat: Substrates are heated up until the debond-on-demand adhesive detaches.
- Induction: Electromagnetic fields generate heat and cause the adhesive to debond.
- Laser: Light from a Near Infrared (NIR) laser triggers a reaction that detaches the adhesive.
- Solvents: A small amount of solvent is applied to the substrates and triggers debonding.
Recovering value with repair and debonding
Adhesives help to minimize waste even after our customers’ products have left the factory and reached the end consumer. Superglues from our LOCTITE brand, for example, make it possible to easily fix all kinds of objects from daily life. That means products stay usable for longer and there’s no need for expensive or resource-intensive replacements.
Debonding-on-demand is making it possible to repair cell phones and enable non-destructive repair, reuse or recycling of electric vehicle batteries. This important function saves valuable parts in repair and reuse as well as precious metals, rare-earth minerals and other resource-intensive materials which are part of these products in recycling—keeping them within the economic cycle for longer. A good example for this are our TEROSON STM Hotmelt adhesives for headlamp bonding, which enable the lens to be removed via debonding and thus allow components such as defected LED modules to be repaired or replaced.
Debond-on-demand adhesives make it possible to safely repair and rework automotive batteries and other vehicle parts, which unlocks huge cost savings for OEMs and suppliers.
Philipp tho Pesch, Expert Battery Sustainability and Debonding for Automotive Adhesives
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Really ready for recycling
If a product can’t be reused or repaired, adhesives can still help it stay off the scrapheap by enabling recycling. This is especially relevant for products with a shorter lifecycle, such as packaging.
Many adhesives from Henkel are specially formulated for compatibility with recycling processes. This means the adhesive does not have to be removed during recycling but becomes part of the recycled material without limiting its quality. To achieve this, the key is choosing the right chemistry and understanding the recycling process in detail.
Next to this intrinsic compatibility with recycling, debond-on-demand technologies also play a key role in supporting circularity at the end of a product’s useful life. Henkel’s wash-off adhesives, for example, make it possible to quickly and efficiently remove labels from plastic bottles before recycling. Henkel further works with Saperatec to co-create technologies for separating layers of flexible packaging—which can involve up to ten different substrates—to facilitate recycling.
Partnerships like this are central to Henkel’s efforts to lead progress for circularity. The company collaborates with cyclos-HTP, which specializes in measuring and certifying whether packaging or goods are recyclable. Together, we design packaging that is compatible with recycling methods. And at our Inspiration Center in Düsseldorf, we operate a paper recyclability testing lab where customers and suppliers find smart solutions to optimize packaging design for recycling together with our experts.
By understanding recycling processes and tailoring adhesives accordingly, our product developers play a key role in helping customers design packaging that meets today’s complex recyclability requirements.
Elodie Picard, Head of Sustainability for Packaging Adhesives
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Fit for the (circular) future
This wide range of innovations and collaborations is helping to accelerate the transition to a circular economy by integrating circularity into new product designs. It is also the cornerstone of Henkel’s Design for Sustainability program: A novel initiative, where we work closely together with customers from the beginning of the product design phase and build on our expertise in sustainability as well as material science to support them in finding the best solutions to make their products more circular.
Our advanced adhesives are enabling customers to integrate circularity into their products and processes. In this way, we are proactively addressing the urgent need for more repair, reuse and recycling—and decoupling economic growth from resource consumption.
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