The transition from fossil-based materials to innovative, renewable, and sustainable alternatives is a critical endeavor across multiple sectors, including automotive, transportation, construction, and packaging. The rubber and plastics processing industry faces the challenge of reducing its carbon footprint due to the prevalent use of CO₂-intensive raw materials.
UPM BioMotion™ RFF offer a perfect solution to significantly increase the renewable material content of rubber and plastic compounds, while concurrently reducing the global warming potential. By exchanging fossil-based and CO₂-intensive materials like carbon black, precipitated silica and other traditional filler systems, the environmental impact of final articles can be easily improved by 50% and more. In combination with other renewable raw materials, such as bio-based polymers and process oils, even CO₂-negative rubber and plastic compounds are already possible today.
In contrast to other traditional functional fillers, UPM BioMotion™ RFF features a much lower material density of only 1.3 g/cm³, which, compared to carbon black and precipitated silica, is more than 25% and 35% lower respectively. Inactive, inorganic white fillers like kaolin, talcum, or siliceous earth are even twice as heavy. This unique natural feature of UPM BioMotion™ RFF allows for significantly reducing the overall compound or final article weight. Depending on the compound design (i.e., polymer type, filler to be replaced, and actual filler loading), final weight savings of 20% and higher can be achieved. Lower compound densities directly result in less consumption of CO₂-intensive raw materials, further improving the compound carbon footprint.