"It is a win-win situation, for the environment and for us as a company"

Time for change: In the igus recycling program, energy and drag chains are collected and recycled regardless of the manufacturer. (Source: igus GmbH)

Plastic machine components are no longer to be imagined without in industry. It is obvious to ask what happens to them at the end of their lifespan regarding recycling. A possible answer is provided by the motion plastics specialist igus. In the chainge Recycling Program, customers can send decommissioned energy and drag chains, regardless of manufacturer, to igus for reuse in exchange for a voucher. One of the companies that has tried this is the special machinery manufacturer Busch Microsystems.

"It is a win-win situation, for the environment and for us as a company," says Dominik Benz of Busch Microsystems Consult GmbH. The design manager of the special machinery manufacturer from Langenlonsheim in Rhineland-Palatinate faced the situation that a customer could not accept a newly developed and already built 3-axis gantry system. In the end, it had to be dismantled. And the 400-kilogram energy chains were no longer needed all at once. So, what to do with the e-chains? "Our igus advisor introduced the igus chainge Recycling Program, which recycles the installed e-chains," recalls Dominik Benz. "That immediately piqued the interest of my colleagues and me."

Sustainable reuse instead of simple incineration

The goal of the chainge Recycling Program, which Busch Microsystems participated in after talking with igus, is to recycle the plastic of the energy and drag chains, reuse it, and thus bring it into a material cycle. Users can send their decommissioned, cleaned plastic chains to igus regardless of manufacturer and receive a voucher in return. The plastics are then sorted by material type, shredded, and processed to meet quality standards in the production process. Plastics from external companies are offered as ground material for sale. A sustainable alternative, because normally the chain, along with other plastic waste, is simply disposed of. Recycling hardly takes place. In most factories, it is more common to dismantle old energy and drag chains from machines and throw them into industrial waste containers. The plastics are then mostly incinerated. A process that no longer made sense to Dominik Benz. "We could not and did not want to turn a blind eye to recycling," he says. Helmut Rath, head of control cabinet construction at IBG Automation, agrees: "Everything we do for our environment is ultimately good invested capital. And: The handling of the return process was straightforward and simple." Thus, Busch Microsystems and IBG Automation join a growing number of companies where plastic recycling is playing an increasingly important role. With the recent return of 3.4 tons in Singapore, the heaviest individual return so far, nearly 17 tons have already been collected worldwide in the igus chainge Recycling Program and locally processed. "That’s a very first step," says Angelina Donner, lean engineer at igus. "We work daily to convince more and more customers to send their energy chains into the recycling process." The Rhineland-Palatinate engineers share this view, as they also want to continue participating in the chainge Recycling Program in the future, as Dominik Benz emphasizes. "We try out many new things in daily development. There are always remnants of e-chains. We now collect these centrally and send them once a year to recycling at igus."