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An online magazine “The Better India” reports about an entrepreneur based in Pune, India, who turned her cash prize from ‘Startup India’ into a footwear brand Nemital that uses recycled end-of-life tire rubber. “I was in my last semester to complete post-graduation in renewable energy from The Energy and Research Institute (TERI) and started hunting for a job in the renewable energy sector,” Pooja Apte, the 28-year-old entrepreneur, recalls for The Better India. “During the process, I learned there are not many people working in the field of upcycling textile and plastic. I decided to work on tires and started experimenting,” she says.

With new European partners, Allianz Zukunft Reifen (AZuR) is gaining additional expertise in pioneering technological fields of the tire circular economy. Among AZuR’s new partners is now Weibold – tire recycling and pyrolysis consulting company from Austria. Beside this, AZuR-Network joined: The Bavarian CTS Bitumen is the technology leader in the rubber modification of bitumen for road construction.

The advantages of pyrolysis to tackle the world's growing disposal problem with end-of-life tires (ELT) in terms of a circular economy were described extensively in the last decade. Pyrolysis is a thermal process that converts organic rubber material into low molecular weight compounds such as pyrolysis gas, pyrolysis oil and raw recovered Carbon Black (ASTM 8178-20a). In contrast to the incineration of ELT, which is often condescendingly referred to as "thermal recycling" or „waste-to-energy“, pyrolysis does not destroy any raw materials, but breaks down the waste product into its chemical raw material components and makes them available for the circular economy. Fortunately, this is in the meantime confirmed by the great demand from the chemical industry for products from ELT pyrolysis.

This September, Robert Weibold attended the First International Cooperation Summit on Tire and Rubber Recycling in Kunshan, China, on 16 and 17 September 2019. The event gathered industry participants from all over China, as well as from the European Union, the United States and other countries. Proclaimed by Zhu Jun, the president of China’s Tire Recycling Association (CTRA), the motto of the summit was “Environment first, Resources second; no mercy to polluting technologies”. As he and many other speakers asserted, China had gone a huge transformation in the tire recycling industry over the last 10 years.