FEICA 2023 Conference and EXPO
Tarragona, Spain, 13-15 September 2023

Presentation Abstract

Sustainable Reactive Hot Melt Adhesives

Regulations, customers, and end-users are driving adhesive solutions to become more sustainable. To address this growing trend, H.B. Fuller have developed a novel approach to sustainable reactive polyurethane hot melt adhesives in collaboration with several strategic raw material suppliers, to reduce the carbon footprint right at the beginning of the value chain. Our route includes the use of polyols derived from bio-sourced raw materials such as corn, soybean, wheat, or castor oil, polyols partially derived from recycled PET bottles, combined with the use of bio-mass balanced Methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI) as a replacement of fossil-based isocyanates. The uniqueness of our approach is the incorporation of all the three above mentioned sustainable raw materials together in our polyurethane hot melt formulation without sacrificing the final properties of these adhesives, which allows our customers to use these with minimum changes to their processes We can achieve sustainability rates up to 93%. Currently, these products are targeted for textile applications, but this concept can be applied to other markets such as woodworking, panels, automotive, electronics, etc. We can use this novel approach in both conventional and low monomer (<0.1% free residual isocyanate monomer) polyurethane reactive hot melt products.

Co-author(s): Pierre-Yves Jaubard; Laurent Chalumeau