Plant tour: Fairmat FairFactory, Nantes, France

“We didn’t launch Fairmat as a recycling company. Yes, we are a material provider that is using waste as a primary source of incoming raw materials, but we are a material provider first and foremost,” emphasizes Benjamin Saada, CEO and founder of Fairmat (Paris, France), a startup that supplies composite materials manufactured from recycled carbon fiber (rCF).

Saada, who previously co-founded the Paris-based aircraft seat manufacturer Expliseat, founded Fairmat in 2020. “We launched this company to replace aluminum,” he explains. “If you look at the specifications of Fairmat’s material, it’s roughly the specifications of aluminum.” He knew that carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites provided the needed mechanical properties, but recognized the higher cost of carbon fiber versus aluminum — and its reliability on petroleum as a precursor material — begged for a better solution.

“We started thinking about how we could use composite waste to create a new material that is at least as good as aluminum if not better, and no more expensive. We ended up developing a completely new process of creating materials,” Saada says.

This process is simple at its highest level: Turning high-quality CFRP scrap into new, reusable materials that retain as much of the original material’s properties as possible. Most recycling technologies in this landscape either involve a chemical- and/or heat-based fiber reclamation process or mechanically grind up the full CFRP scrap — all of which typically results in very small pieces that are then compounded for use in injection molding.  

Fairmat’s technology (detailed more below), however, is centered on two main points: retaining as much of the length and performance of the original fibers as possible to create new materials with high value, and doing this through a digitally traceable, data-optimized process.

The company’s cornerstone product is its chips. These are single-ply, cured and precision-cut from woven or unidirectional (UD) CFRP, in standard sizes of 10 × 4-centimeter rectangles or 6 × 6-centimeter squares. The chips can be provided as they are, or further manufactured into one of Fairmat’s other products — single-ply, wider FairPatch or longer FairStrip elements, multi-layer custom Fairmat Plate laminates, or sheets and rolls of layup-ready FairPly. The company’s latest product, FairBoard, diverges from the chip concept for the first time, with the manufacture of structural panels made from recycled pultruded profiles.

Fairmat decided to work with chips as its baseline product “because we wanted to be able to control the length of the fiber that we keep in the mix,” Saada explains. “If you use a grinding process, for example, you’re breaking the fiber. The decision was all about providing our customers with as high performance and useful of a material as we could.”

The key, Saada explains, is finding a way to manage material input diversity. “If you cannot manage this, you cannot guarantee any kind of quality. Because of this constraint, it was obvious to me that digital data management was the only way to scale this solution. We started simple, just by recording everything in order to find a way to standardize our hardware, machines and our process.” This then expanded to today’s in-house software system FairTrack, which enables real-time data tracking, connects all machines within the plant and provides AI-enabled correction for cutting and ply placement.

This level of digitization is not yet common in composite materials and parts production facilities, and thus impressive. “The fact the products are recycled is a cherry on top,” notes Saada, “but the goal was always about answering industry needs for high-performance and lightweight materials that aren’t dependent on natural resources.”

For source material, high-quality, high-quantity manufacturing scrap from the aerospace industry was the natural place to start. One of the startup’s  first partnerships was with the European branch of carbon fiber manufacturer Hexcel Corp. (Stamford, Conn., U.S.) to recycle prepreg cutoffs. Fairmat’s Nantes production site is a former Hexcel plant that the company originally leased in 2022 as part of this partnership and now owns. Since then, Fairmat has announced partnerships with multiple other carbon fiber manufacturers or OEMs that supply the company with high-quality scrap materials, including Airbus, Dassault Aviation, Siemens Gamesa, Syensqo and Tarmac Aerosave.

Today, Fairmat employs about 100 people and operates four sites —  its Paris headquarters and R&D lab; a main production and development site in Nantes, France; a second production site in Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.; and a new development site in Danyang, China. According to Saada, about 70% of the company’s business is in Europe and 30% in the U.S.

CW recently had the opportunity to participate in a tour of the Nantes production site to learn more about Fairmat’s process of manufacturing its rCF materials.

The FairFactory: From scrap to chips to final products

The 2,000-square-meter Nantes production site is called the FairFactory and employs 54 people on-site — more than half of which are engineers managing the software and mechatronics — operating 25 robots and a full-scale process from recycling to materials manufacturing to quality inspection and new development.

Currently, Fairmat mostly processes carbon fiber/epoxy prepreg scrap from aerospace manufacturing. The company is also working on processes incorporating other feedstocks, and more recently, has started receiving profiles sourced from wind energy spar caps made from carbon fiber and either vinyl ester (VE) or polyester (PE).

Julien Pascal, head of sales at Fairmat and one of the tour leaders, explains that incoming scrap feedstock materials are stored in a small accessory unit outside the main building. “When we start working with a new supplier, the materials first need to go through a range of quality tests and are qualified at the lab in Paris,” Pascal explains.

A small test lab on-site at Nantes also houses equipment for measuring incoming material parameters like fiber density and thickness as needed. Mechanical tests like bending and tensile tests on final parts or chips can also be performed on equipment here, and Fairmat plans to soon add additional machines for increased test capabilities.

“All of the data of course goes into the FairTrack system to ensure it’s all traced in the system,” Pascal emphasizes.

Preparing the materials: Curing and cutting

First, films are removed from prepreg waste. Then the first process step for waste feedstock is a curing step via a France Etuves (Chelles, France) oven, which cures the pieces of material together into one single-ply sheet.

Out of the oven, the materials are sorted by a technician into material type — woven fabric versus UD, and different types of carbon fiber — into bins, and tagged with printed tracking labels that will travel with them and be scanned at each step through the rest of the process.

The cured single-ply sheets are then moved to one of five Gunnar (Altstätten, Switzerland) Novex AI-optimized, automated cutting machines to be cut into one of the company’s standard chip size parameters or a customer-specific custom patch pattern.

A sixth, newer cutting machine is set apart for R&D. This station is equipped with a projector and camera system that project the cutting pattern onto the material. The system is controlled by in-house-created cutting software that generates and sends data into FairTrack to measure cutting process efficiency in real time.

This cutting efficiency is key, Pascal explains — the goal is to reuse as much of the repurposed material as possible. The small amount of scrap that is left is typically rerouted back into the initial processing steps to be made into new chips.

At this point, chips are ready for final inspection and shipment to customers. Or, they can be moved to another area of the FairFactory for manufacture into the company’s FairPly product.

Manufacturing FairPly

A roll or sheet of FairPly is essentially composed of two elements — a single layer of rCF/epoxy chips bonded to a supportive substrate material, that is typically a glass or carbon fabric. Substrates are first prepped with a layer of liquid PE to serve as a binder and adhesive for the chips.

A series of four robotic cells house two Kuka (Augsburg, Germany) pick-and-place robots supporting each layup platform on which the substrate is placed. The robots then automatically place chips in programmed patterns onto the substrate, and ultimately bond them to the PE-based substrate via a cold atmosphere plasma process.

As the robotic cell continues working, Saada explains, “Quality control is ensured at every step of the robot’s process.” Cameras at the top of each cell provide FairTrack with constant visual information such as size and angles of each chip, while sensors on the robotic arms relay information such as chip weight — this data is being used by the system to constantly adjust the cell’s activity to account for any small inconsistencies in the recycled materials.

“FairTrack is the brain of the factory,” Saada emphasizes.

The orientation, angle and shape in which the chips are placed is vital to the performance of the overall FairPly product. The standard 6 × 6 and 10 × 4-centimeter chip sizes were developed to make themost efficient and highest-performance use of the fibers — “and to retain as much fiber length as possible while using as much waste as possible,” Pascal says.

Final FairPly sheets finish curing at room temperature, and then can be rolled and shipped as off-the-shelf products or finished per customer specifications.

While the timing for each sheet depends on specific size and specifications, approximately 77,000 chips are processed into FairPly per week on this line.

Finally, on the main factory floor beside the cutting machine area, a product inspection station is set up for final inspection of representative chip samples and finished custom materials before packaging and shipment. Size, angles, fiber alignment and other measurements are recorded via FairTrack. At the time of the FairFactory tour, customer shoe inserts were being readied in this area for final inspection.

New and in development: FairBoards and pipes, Infinite Recycling

The tour ends in the development room — this is not Fairmat’s full R&D site, which is located at its headquarters in Paris, but an area in which new machines and technologies can be evaluated for use on the FairFactory floor.

At the time of this tour, the company set up several demonstrations showcasing developments both from the Nantes site and its other facilities.

New product capabilities. Claire Schune, product manager, introduces the company’s latest product, FairBoard, which right now is being produced out of the Fairmat facility in China, though there is are small development presses at the Nantes site and the Paris R&D lab.

Why the Chinese facility? “The full-sized press we acquired is in China, so logistically it makes sense to do the development work in China,” Saada explains. The goal is to bring the technology to Nantes as well.

These panels, manufactured currently up to 4 × 1.6 meters in size, start from a base of rCF/PE or carbon fiber/VE waste from pultruded spar caps sourced from the wind energy industry. Fairmat has developed and patented a low-energy method for cutting these spar caps to size, after which the materials are laid up between layers of glass fabric and new liquid epoxy. The board is then pressed in a closed mold. “The glass fabric and epoxy serve as extra reinforcement to the recycled material. It fills in any cracks in the pultruded waste and keeps the board leak-tight,” Schune says. Epoxy was chosen over PE or VE for its higher mechanical strength and fatigue resistance to meet customer performance standards, while still being compatible with the original resin and working as an adhesive to bond the assembly together. After molding, the FairBoards are trimmed and can be painted.

In Nantes, the Fairmat team is working on automating and optimizing this process, with a development-scale robotic cell that is similar to the FairPly cells. “FairBoards are basically just bigger chips, in a way,” Schune says. Similarly, in the development cell, AI-enabled cameras are being optimized to scan and correct the layup process, and a robotic arm operates a roller for laying up the glass fabric layers. An AI-optimized, robotic resin deposit system is also in development.

The final FairBoard panels can be used for a variety of end-use applications, including countertops and wall or ceiling panels.

In addition to FairBoard, the company also recently launched a version of its Fairmat Plates that are optimized with a special surface treatment for molding into pipes or other tube-shaped parts. These were on display in the days before CW’s visit to the FairFactory at JEC World 2026.

“Our surface treatment creates a more flexible version of the plates and chips, and there are no limits to the types of applications possible,” Saada says.

Quality inspection. The Fairmat team is also constantly working on further optimizing its quality inspection system, including its processing software for analyzing camera images of chips ply-by-ply to inspect for gaps, overlaps and distance between chips. “We always want to continue optimizing and improving the precision of our robots,” Pascal says.

Infinity Recycling. Michael Gaultois, chief science officer, and Pauline Prouilhac, materials engineer, present Fairmat’s Infinity Recycling process, which is a patented technology that uses a cold atmospheric plasma system, optimized to fit Fairmat’s needs, to break the bond between Fairmat chips without damaging the chips themselves.

“We ultimately want to be able to not only make materials from rCF feedstocks from our supply partners, but to collect parts made from our FairPly materials back, remove the new resin that was added in the FairPly process in between the chips and give these parts another life,” Gaultois explains.

Rackets, skis, shoes and more

After leaving the FairFactory, Fairmat’s customers further mold these materials into a variety of end-use parts, especially in the sporting goods sector. Today, recycled chips and plates can be found in skis, tennis rackets, padel rackets, running shoe inserts, sports helmets and more.

The company is moving toward applications in new markets like construction pipes and brackets, and drone airframes.

New investment, partnerships and next steps

Saada acknowledges that for all companies that work in the recycled materials space, funding and investment are constant challenges. “There are so many initiatives being launched that it’s somewhat diluting the investment and the energy. While we obviously need several technologies for recycling, right now the industry really needs to focus on the few technologies that make the most sense.”

That said, Fairmat has seen success both in attracting investments and other partnerships, including most recently the announcement of €10 million in equity from the Circular Plastics Fund, managed by Infinity Recycling (Rotterdam, Netherlands), in addition to an announced €51.5 million raised in early 2025.

Securing long-term feedstock supply and interest in recycled products is also a challenge to all in the rCF space. For example, the main drivers to recycle manufacturing scrap or adopt rCF into new applications are still coming from private actors versus regulatory incentives. While there are a growing number of companies on board, including aircraft OEMs like Airbus and Boeing, “I think the authorities need to push the market a little bit in this direction,” Saada says.

In March 2026, coinciding with JEC World, Fairmat announced six new partnerships expanding both its feedstock supply base and new application areas for its materials. These include an expanded partnership to recycle prepreg scrap feedstock from Syensqo; an R&D initiative to explore new approaches for recovering materials from end-of-life aircraft parts with Airbus; and deals to supply rCF materials for use in construction applications (Etex), racket sports equipment (Babolat) and orthotic footwear (Launchpad O&P and Billy Footwear).

“We’ve always positioned ourselves as not only a recycling company, but as a high-performance material supplier for sporting goods,” Saada says. “Now we’re aiming to replicate what we’ve done in sporting goods to other sectors like construction, and to deploy our materials into applications with industry leaders. We are very proud and excited of this first step with Etex in Europe, but we know we can do much more.”

Along with growing its feedstock and customer bases, Fairmat aims short-term to focus on the launch of its FairBoard products and longer-term, to continue expanding its footprint internationally, particularly in China and the U.S.

Saada notes, “For many years, most of the green innovation was more expensive, and we [as a society] started to associate those two characteristics. But that is not what Fairmat is about. My strongest conviction is that economic rationality is also ecological rationality. At the end of the day, if you reduce CO₂ emissions, you save energy. If you save energy, the product is ultimately cheaper. Economical and ecological innovation are naturally aligned. At Fairmat, we’ve created a solution that is good, technically smart, economically viable and scalable. The incentive for the customer is the quality, the cost and the performance of our product.”