TenCate Grass is announcing a new program in the U.S. to recycle end-of-life artificial grass — an initiative that leverages Cyclyx’s feedstock processing expertise and ExxonMobil’s Exxtend technology for advanced recycling.
The goal of this effort is to help solve the problem that has challenged the industry for years: how to efficiently and effectively recycle synthetic turf into feedstock that can be used to create new turf and other valuable products.
“At TenCate, we are committed to leading the industry and moving sustainability forward in a meaningful way,” said Joe Fields, president and CEO of TenCate Grass Americas. “We understand the issue of end-of-life synthetic turf, and we have taken it upon ourselves to find a true solution for the entire industry. Our goal is to keep turf out of landfills and put it back to use.”
Known as TenCate Turf Recycling Solutions, the program is starting by processing 50 aged turf fields from high schools and college campuses. The end-of-life turf will be shipped to a Southern California facility where it will be shredded.
The shredded turf will then be delivered from California to Texas, where Cyclyx International will further pre-process it before sending the turf to ExxonMobil’s Baytown advanced recycling facility. With ExxonMobil’s proprietary Exxtend™ technology, the end-of-life turf will be broken down into raw materials that can be used to make new products that are no different in quality and performance than those made from virgin raw materials. In addition to strengthening the circularity of plastics, ExxonMobil has found that its recycling technology does so while delivering lower relative GHG emissions when compared to processing the same amount of fossil-based feedstocks.
“Our advanced recycling technology has already processed millions of pounds of otherwise difficult to recycle plastics, like food packaging and artificial turf, that are generally not recycled today,” said Dave Andrew, VP of New Market Development at ExxonMobil. “With our scalable technology and collaborations like this one alongside TenCate Grass and Cyclyx, we are helping to meet the growing demand for circular products.”
ExxonMobil’s recycling facility in Baytown has processed more than 11 million pounds of plastic waste, as of June 2022. ExxonMobil is expanding to a large-scale advanced recycling facility at the site, which, upon startup later this year, will be among North America’s largest advanced plastic recycling facilities, with the capacity to recycle 66 million pounds of plastic waste per year. Beyond Baytown, plans are underway for up to 1 billion pounds of advanced recycling capacity annually by year-end 2026 across multiple sites globally.
This program with ExxonMobil and Cyclyx builds on TenCate’s groundbreaking efforts to recycle synthetic turf. In the Netherlands, where the company headquarters are located, TenCate recycles its end-of-life turf into Ecocept, an elastic layer in sports fields and third parties also use the agglomerated material to manufacture new products.
TenCate now wants to expand its recycling efforts worldwide.
“As the global leader of synthetic turf, we have made sustainability a keystone in everything we do,” Fields said.
After this initial phase is complete, TenCate plans to expand the initiative across the U.S. — an effort that’s needed now more than ever. In North America alone, the total value of installed synthetic turf systems was estimated at $2.7 billion in 2020, according to the Synthetic Turf Council. This translates into roughly 265 million square feet of installed turf.
