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We are proud to share that Weibold Academy has been shortlisted for the 2025 Recircle Awards in the Tyre Industry Education Award category! This nomination recognizes our commitment to providing high-quality education and expertise in tire recycling, pyrolysis, and circular economy solutions. We are honored to be acknowledged alongside other industry leaders who are shaping the future of sustainable tire management.

In the end of this article we make an estimation of a possible annual market size of recovered carbon black, modestly assuming virgin carbon black substitution rate at 20%. Hint: numbers suggest that recovered carbon black production is a profitable business rich in opportunities. Traditionally Carbon Black (CB) has been used as both a reinforcing agent and filler in automobile tires. Along with better understanding of CB’s unique properties as a material, it is presently used in a much wider range of applications across a large variety of products – car tires, conveyor belts, inks, plastic pipes, rubber mats, shoe soles and so forth. Virgin CB contains only trace amounts of impurities and carbon content is very close to 100%.

Attempting to cut costs while launching a tire recycling or pyrolysis business, companies often fall prey to low-quality equipment manufacturers whose equipment does not fulfill to their promises. Typically, such a low quality equipment has far more attractive prices and very often comes from countries, where labor and material costs are still very low. Although seemingly benefitting its buyer through low initial capital investment, such equipment can kill a young pyrolysis company or seriously undermine its operation. In this article Weibold focuses on issues of low-priced pyrolysis machinery and sheds light on the most common problems occurring with such pyrolysis equipment suppliers.

For many years, tire recycling industry and business worldwide could not design economical solutions to efficiently recycle end-of-life off-the-road (OTR) tires. While OTR tires consist of high-quality natural rubber, one of the challenges in recycling them was transport. Huge size and weight of OTR tires do not allow transporting these tires easily and, as a result, these end-of-life tires used to be buried in quarries and on mining sites. Today, new technologies and innovations in engineering design give us hope that OTR tire recycling will soon become a common practice.

Today, scrap tires find numerous uses in many industrial applications and consumer goods. Even though the number of applications grows, there is still a huge surplus of scrap tires available for recycling and many tire stockpiles around the world will remain intact yet for decades. Researchers claim, however, that a huge number of scrap tires can be successfully reused in concrete; interestingly, not only rubber can be used to improve properties of concrete, but the bulk of other materials contained in tires, i.e. recycled steel and synthetic fibers. This article briefly summarizes findings of such researches.

This article is a review by Claus Lamer, a Co-Founder at Carbon Recovery GmbH. Weibold’s Academy article series discusses periodically the practical developments and scientific research findings in the end-of-life tire (ELT) recycling and pyrolysis industry. One of the goals is to give entrepreneurs in this industry, project initiators, investors and also the public, a better insight into a rapidly growing circular economy. At the same time, this article series should also be a stimulus for discussion.

This article should give an overview over the recent development trends regarding the options for an upgrade of the tire-derived oil (TDO) with chemical and physical techniques. In two previous articles we have already dealt with the production of limonene and highlighted the advantages of fractional distillation of TDO. Introduction Refiners around the world are looking for alternatives to producing fuels from petrochemicals only. This is due to expected future declines in crude oil reserves combined with significant fuel demand growth expectations throughout the world and increasing environmental awareness among the population.

To build a successful tire recycling or pyrolysis business, one needs to first of all identify markets and products and properly build sales channels. This is a rather complex task, as it is composed of many difficult and field-specific details.Nowadays one may think of the Internet as a pioneering marketing tool to help sell products. Partly this is true, as there are many platforms for retailing or wholesaling across the entire world. But despite the ease of launching online sales, feasibility needs to be carefully calculated before you start recycling tires.

Recycling tires into materials such as steel-free crumb rubber and fine rubber powder used to be a profitable venture; however, due to market saturation in developed economies, tire recycling companies might want to shift their focus from raw materials to potentially higher-priced consumer goods made from recycled rubber or even virgin rubber which can be replaced by tire-derived materials. The first and so far one of the most viable choices of tire recyclers would be investing in presses and molds to produce molded goods from crumb rubber or rubber powder. Another options include more complex technologies, e.g. blending recycled rubber powder with polyethylene or polypropylene to produce thermoplastic elastomers (TPE).