This time of year, the summer season can bring warmer weather for many parts of the world. After a few days of scorching temperatures, it’s easy to begin reminiscing on cooler temperatures or wishing for snow this winter, as you imagine building a snowman or hitting the slopes to make getting through the summer heat more bearable. Through a new collaborative project with sport equipment specialist TSL, LyondellBasell is thinking of snow this winter, too.
TSL, using LyondellBasell CirculenRecover Engineered Polymers Polyamide (EP PA), created an innovative snowshoe which will delight outdoor sport fans. The footbed of the new shoe model contains approximately 80% of recycled materials and combines extreme resistance with a trendy design. Recovering plastic waste from the environment (both pre- and post-consumer waste), CirculenRecover polymers are made from a mechanical recycling process.
“Snowshoes and their footbed are used in extreme conditions, so they need to be highly resistant to impact and cold temperatures, as well as durable over time,” said Bruno Viala, Business Development Manager at LyondellBasell. “After several meetings and trials for the snowshoes, our combined teams landed on CirculenRecover EP PA to deliver high quality functionality and durability.”
As a world leader in snowshoe development and manufacturing, TSL’s values are strongly connected to the respect of nature, wellbeing and innovation. TSL’s challenge was to find recycled plastic materials that could fulfill all technical and visual requirements.
“This recent collaboration yielded an excellent compatibility for both teams,” said Yoan Bibollet, head of development at TSL. “It was our first time working with LyondellBasell on the development of a new product, and we were impressed by the material and compounding experience of their teams. The plastic material which we selected for the footbed ticked all the boxes.”
TSL’s sustainable snowshoe model is now going into serial production and will be available for the winter season 2022/2023. TSL tested its prototypes in real life, rough conditions and LyondellBasell’s product successfully passed all tests without any issues. These claims further verified LyondellBasell’s ability to achieve high functionality in a sustainable way.
For more information about LyondellBasell CirculenRecover, click here.
