Toray Industries, announced that its French subsidiary, Toray Carbon Fibers Europ, has obtained ISCC PLUS certification for its Lacq and Abidos production plants in South-West France.

This certification allows Toray Carbon Fibers Europe to allocate and use biomass or recycled materials through the mass balance approach to produce and supply carbon fiber. Thus, Toray Carbon Fibers Europe now has the ability to reduce the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) of its carbon fiber, prepreg, and other offerings and help its customers to enhance product Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) while contributing to building a circular economy.

Toray Carbon Fibers Europe will start manufacturing carbon fiber derived from biomass and recycled raw materials by the end of 2023. In addition, Toray’s Ehime Plant in Japan aims to obtain ISCC PLUS certification by March 2024 and begin producing fiber by the close of that year. In the USA, the carbon fiber facility of Toray Composite Materials America, Inc. in Decatur, Alabama, also plans to obtain this certification in 2024. With these three locations obtaining certification, the Toray Group intends to manufacture carbon fiber using biomass or recycled raw materials at plants in Japan, the United States, and Europe, ensuring stable supplies to customers around the globe.

Toray has already received requests from customers similarly committed to carbon neutrality. From the end of 2023, Toray will offer this carbon fiber for industrial applications such as automobiles and handheld devices where demand for materials to create sustainable products is particularly high. At a later date, other applications, such as aviation and sports, will also be targeted.

Toray aims to build a new materials ecosystem that harnesses natural raw materials and returns them to nature in an eco-friendly state. For carbon fiber, the ecosystem will be built using biomass and recycled raw materials to manufacture carbon fiber. This fiber will be made into a composite material and, finally, an end product. At the end of the product’s life cycle, continuous carbon fiber will be repurposed for the use as discontinuous fiber in other products. The last stage of the carbon fiber’s life cycle will be its recycling for water treatment or soil improvement.