TEAM² (www.team2.fr) is a competitiveness cluster situated in Nord-Pas de Calais and specializing in waste recycling or recovery and - more generally - in recyclable materials.
Its main research areas are the following:
- Treatment and recovery of mineral waste, in particular maritime and fluvial sediments, waste from the building industry, as well as polluted soils (development of secondary raw materials derived from sediments (SRM), development of a method for separating gypsum, use of SRM in new concrete formulations…);
- Recovery of strategic metals, i.e. rare earths (development of methods for capturing indium, building up of a recycling chain for electronic cards...);
- Treatment of organic waste, e.g. plastics, wood and textiles (improved use of recycled plastics, reliability of the detection and identification of resins, wood gasification...);
- Glass recovery, including flat glass and niche markets such as screens and lamps (creation of industries around windshields or around polyvinyl butyral recovery…).
Working on the above-mentioned topics will enable the recovery of end-of-life products and materials, household or industrial waste, and second-life products, as well as the design of materials with lower environmental footprint.
The TEAM² cluster integrates most of the stakeholders involved in gathering, sorting, processing, and recovering materials. Actually, in Nord-Pas de Calais, 200 eco-companies among 300 were already involved in TEAM² as part of the regional cluster that has led to its genesis. TEAM² is also supported by French leading waste processing companies (e.g. Veolia Environment and Suez Environment) and other large cross-border companies (Galloo).
Furthermore, over recent years, most of leading colleges and universities in the cluster area, such as École des Mines de Douai, University of Lille, École Centrale of Lille and University of Artois, have developed training modules related to recovery industries.