A Safer Alternative Replacement for Thiourea Based Accelerators in the Production Process of Chloroprene Rubber

Objective

In December 2007, the European Commission imposed a total of € 247 635 000 fines on the five largest manufacturers of chloroprene rubber for participating in a cartel. As a result of this price fixing and market abuse by large enterprises, the SME involvement in this sector has diminished and requires research investment to re-build its presence. Additionally there is increasing pressure to replace the vulcanisation accelerator, ethylene thiourea (ETU), due to its assessment as a Cat 2 rep carcinogen as per the EU classification, IARC and EPA. It is believed that under REACH it will be classified as a CMR substance (Carcinogenic/Mutagenic/toxic for Reproduction) which will lead to legislation prohibiting or banning its use. The ‘SafeRubber’ project aims to develop a safer alternative accelerator to replace the carcinogenic ethylene thiourea (ETU) based accelerators to be used in the manufacturing of rubbers such as polychloroprene (CR) and epichlorohydrin (ECO). This will be based around a new catalyst molecule that has tri-functionality, which offers the added benefit of reducing consumption of metal oxides during manufacturing, lowering manufacturing costs and giving SMEs another unique differentiator, allowing them to compete in the market.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

• natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistryinorganic compounds
• natural scienceschemical sciencescatalysis
• natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryaliphatic compounds

Programme(s)

• FP7-SME - Specific Programme "Capacities": Research for the benefit of SMEs

Topic(s)

• SME-2 - Research for SME associations

Call for proposal

FP7-SME-2008-2
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Coordinator

Participants (12)