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Southampton City Council, and highways partner Balfour Beatty Living Places, are pioneering the use of Rubber Modified Asphalt to reduce the environmental impact of highways maintenance activities. Southampton City Council recently approved an additional £10m investment to resurface residential roads and pavements across the city – boosting investment to a record £22 million over the next two years. As part of this program the council and its highways partner, Balfour Beatty Living Places, is pioneering a new method for resurfacing which puts waste rubber that would have otherwise ended up in landfill to good use.

The French sports retail company Decathlon together with its innovation partners Rubberlink and Tintex, initiated two of these pilot projects, which consist of prototype footwear made from recycled end-of-life tires. The innovators at Rubberlink created a solution of devulcanized tire rubber that allowed Decathlon Portugal to produce a prototype shoe with a 100 per cent recycled rubber sole. According to data from Genan, in comparison with the use of virgin raw materials to produce similar products, for each ton of tire that is recycled, less than 700 kg of carbon emissions are produced.

According to recent media release, Rice University lab’s optimized flash process could reduce carbon emissions, which could be be where the rubber truly hits the road. Rice University scientists have optimized a process to convert waste from end-of-life rubber and tires into graphene that can, in turn, be used to strengthen concrete. The environmental benefits of adding graphene to concrete are clear, chemist James Tour says. “Concrete is the most-produced material in the world, and simply making it produces as much as 9% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions,” Tour said. “If we can use less concrete in our roads, buildings and bridges, we can eliminate some of the emissions at the very start.”

In May 2019, Carbon Craft Design launched its first carbon tile production. The manufacturing of the carbon tiles is a three-step process. First, carbon is collected from tire pyrolysis based factories, which is then processed at a facility and finally converted into tiles at a manufacturing unit located in Morbi, Gujarat. The entire process of making these tiles consumes one-fifth of the energy required to make vitrified tiles and reduces air pollution by 30,000 liters of carbon for each tile made.

According to Global Rubber Markets, an online magazine devoted to virgin and recycled rubber, a tire processing plant is expected to be constructed in Scotland. The project, reportedly, is the first of its kind in the UK, and it is expected to solve Scotland’s end-of-life tire problem and create over 100 jobs for the local area. A notice of pre-application has been submitted to Renfrewshire council, informing planners of the intent to build a ground-breaking tire processing plant in Linwood (Renfrewshire), Scotland.

Wastefront AS – a Norewegian tire pyrolysis company – announced an exclusive long-term project delivery partnership with Devaltec LLC, a project developer and solutions provider in new and sustainable energies from the United States. Devaltec, which was first introduced to Wastefront by Vitol in 2019, will now act as the primary strategic partner to Wastefront and will co-lead the development of all upcoming projects for the next 5 years. Devaltec is contracted to successfully deliver production from multiple plants of minimum 1000 MTD, commencing with Wastefront’s first waste tire recycling plant in Sunderland, due for completion in 2023.

ShipInsight – an online magazine focused on ship operation, ship management and marine journalism – reports that an energy and commodity trader Vitol and Wastefront, the Norwegian waste tire pyrolysis company, have announced a 10-year offtake agreement for the production of liquid hydrocarbons (pyrolytic fuel oil) and certain non-liquid products which will be produced at Wastefront’s first waste tire pyrolysis plant in Sunderland, UK, on its completion in 2023. In addition to the offtake agreement, Vitol and Wastefront have also established a framework agreement for the 10-year offtake from future end-of-life tire pyrolysis plants to be developed and built by Wastefront.

Kal Tire’s new carbon calculator quantifies environmental savings when retreading tires. The company recently announced the certification of its new carbon calculator that is able to determine fuel and carbon emissions saved by retreading earthmover tires compared to buying new. With that, the company is launching its Maple Program, which quantifies a customer’s environmental impact as they grow their fleet with tire retreads.

US-based Bridgestone announced recently that it has commenced producing tires containing carbon black (rCB) at its facility in Des Moines. In tire production, the company relies on carbon black supplies from its partner Delta-Energy, and uses its product, D-E Black, as the only source of the recycled material. Currently, Bridgestone has bought some 215 metric tons of Delta Energy’s rCB – this is the equivalent of over 60,000 scrap tires. By the end of next year, the company expects to apply around 6,800 of D-E Black, which would reduce over 20 million pounds of carbon emissions.