News: Tire Recycling & Pyrolysis

The team of Weibold, a tire recycling and tire pyrolysis consulting company based in Vienna, Austria, is speaking at a webinar organized by the International Institute of Synthetic Rubber Producers (IISRP). The webinar Trends & Opportunities for Circular Raw Materials from the Tire Waste Stream will be conducted by Andreas Kyriakou, Senior Partner at Weibold, and Claus Lamer, Senior Pyrolysis Consultant at Weibold. The webinar will be available in two sessions: Session I: December 7th - 9am CET / 5pm JST and Session II: December 7th - 9am CT US / 4pm CET. To register for the webinars, please proceed to the IISRP website using links above.

Smithers – a global leader in rubber, plastics and polymer testing and market reports – spoke with tires expert Howard Colvin, author of Smithers’ latest report The Future of Carbon Black vs. Silica in Tires to 2027, about the challenges facing the tire industry and expected developments. Howard Colvin has many years of experience in the tire industry with 22 years at Goodyear and 12 years with Cooper. At Cooper he worked in the Advanced Technology group and led Cooper’s consortium of academia, industry and government to develop a guayule concept tire. Howard is the 2021 Melvin Mooney Distinguished Technology award winner for exhibiting exceptional technical competency in rubber science and technology.

In a joint appeal, leading tire manufacturers Michelin and Bridgestone believe that there is the potential for an annual total market of up to 1 million tons of recovered carbon black by 2030. The appeal was made last week at the Smithers Recovered Carbon Black Conference in Berlin, which Enviro attended and where the company’s chairman, Alf Blomqvist, was one of the speakers. Both Michelin and Bridgestone have set a goal that by 2050, their tires will consist of 100% sustainable materials. At their appearance in Berlin, both companies stated that the capacity to produce recovered carbon black that meets manufacturer specifications is small compared to the total carbon black market.

Tyre Stewardship Australia (TSA) – the end-of-life tire management authority designing programs and regulations for tire recycling and material recovery in the country – is inviting innovators to help improve the recovery of large off-the-road (OTR) tires once they reach end of life. Around 120,000 tons of end-of-life OTR tires are sent to landfill every year. These tires are used in some of Australia’s most important industries: mining, agriculture, construction, manufacturing and aviation. At end of life, less than 15% of these tires are recovered and then recycled for use as a new resource, the remainder are stockpiled, buried onsite or sent to landfill.

DRI Rubber – the global leader in reprocessed- and fiber reinforced rubber compounds and products – proudly reintroduces LRP Matting, as the official brand for all rubber matting products and solutions. With this DRI Rubber gives focus and dedication to its brand, as LRP Matting will become a division of DRI Rubber. Boosting the well-being of both humans and animals, and improving the environmental footprint of both our customers and the rubber industry as a whole, LRP Matting has a solution for every surface and every size.

Scandinavian Enviro Systems (publ) (Enviro) has received a recovered tire pyrolysis oil order worth MSEK 2 from Swedish fuel company Preem. The oil will be delivered in the first quarter 2023 and used by Preem for production tests. The fuel company Preem will use the delivered oil as a raw material for production tests to determine how suitable it is for the production of different biofuels. These tests will take place at Preem’s refinery in Lysekil, which has already been granted a permit to conduct production tests of tire pyrolysis oil.

The results are in from the world’s first full-scale test of concrete road safety barriers constructed with rubber crumb from end-of-life tires; and a new, innovative Australian public safety product has passed the ‘crash test’ and is now on track to go to market. The product – called Rubber T-Lok – has been developed by Saferoads and researchers from the University of Melbourne’s Advanced Protective Technologies of Engineering Structures (APTES) Research Group, with funding and support from Tyre Stewardship Australia (TSA).

SIGNUS’s project created in partnership with Segurvital – as well as initiatives by Aigües de Mataró, Heineken, Circoolar, Unidad Editorial - Expansión, and Universidad Francisco de Vitoria – has won in various categories in the 4th BASF Circular Economy Awards which took place in Madrid on November 10. As the SME category winner, SIGNUS highlights its involvement in the project developed with the company Segurvital, which has approved a protection system for motorcyclists that incorporates rubber rollers from tires and demonstrated outstanding effectiveness in tests.

Tyromer – a Canadian tire devulcanization company – announced that its recycled rubber material, produced via its environmentally sustainable, non-chemical extruder devulcanization of end-of-life tire rubber, is now used by Continental Tires. This is the result of a multi-year collaboration driven by the shared commitment of the two companies to circular economy in which end-of-life tire rubber is reused in the production of new tires. Tire-to-Tire recycling represents in many cases the most direct and energy efficient way to reuse what is still largely considered and treated as a waste.