News: Weibold Academy

Pyrolysis is an age old concept, whereas pyrolysis from end-of-life tires (ELTs) is a nascent field in an immature market. Today, in the ever present push towards a circular economy, this technology receives ever more attention in the tire recycling community – investments in tire pyrolysis businesses increase, technology keeps advancing and ever more operators appear on the market worldwide.

By its nature, tire recycling and pyrolysis are capital-intensive businesses which require rather big investments to lay a foundation of successful production. The industry is constantly changing. Existing markets are under threat, other markets emerge. More than ever it is important to facilitate and support R&D efforts. Associations and businesses around the world work hard to protect existing and build new markets for the industry by developing new value-added products from the main output materials of the industry – recycled rubber granulates (crumb rubber), pyrolytic fuel oil and recovered carbon black (rCB).

As circular economy concept and tire recycling are becoming more popular all over the world, the first issue that may arise is the need to secure the raw material, namely end-of-life tires (ELT). Normally, tire recycling companies source their feedstock from collection programs or directly from tire stockpiles. Local ELT stockpiles in developing countries eventually may have limited supplies, because if ELT regulations were not in place before, tires may have been simply landfilled or burnt.

When it comes to tire recycling, it appears well-known that proper end-of-life tire (ELT) recycling techniques are utterly important for proper recovery of valuable materials and their reuse. However, it is equally important to: 1) Understand the life cycle of the end-of-life tire materials, 2) Assess footprint of different types of recycling / recovery on environment and quantifying and 3) Qualitatively and quantitively assess the effect that material and energy flows of a given product have on our communities, our planet, our health, economies, and the way we live. As a specialized consulting company, Weibold is competent in carrying out Life Cycle Assessment for circular economy concepts involving end-of-life tire recycling and pyrolysis products. Read our article below and submit your request at sales@weibold.com to inquire about our services.

Devulcanization is a method of potentially “upgrading” end-of-life tire rubber. Devulcanized rubber is a higher valued form of end-of-life rubber, since devulcanized material can be partly revulcanized and partially replace virgin rubber in specific compounds and applications, including tires. Currently, only a small number of devulcanization systems are operating on industrial scale. These are primarily small-capacity systems, which are devulcanizing rubber production rejects (NR, SBR, NBR, EPDM, Butyl, etc.) or rubber recovered from waste tires. There are different types of devulcanization technologies on the market; among them are: are chemical, purely mechanical, machinal with supercritical CO2, chemical/mechanical, microwave, ultrasonic and organic

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.

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, young companies often fall prey to low-quality equipment manufacturers whose equipment does not correspond to their promises. Typically, such a low quality equipment has far more attractive prices and very often it comes from Asian countries, where labor costs are still very low. Despite the low price, such an equipment can kill a young pyrolysis company or significantly undermine it’s operation. In this article Weibold focuses on issues of low-priced pyrolysis machinery and sheds light on the most common problems occurring with pyrolysis equipment suppliers from the Far East.

In this article, Weibold highlights the ways tire recycling industry can adapt to future changes. It also analyses established and new solutions to reduce the need for inter-continental end-of-life tire trading. As a recycling industry we have a particular responsibility to help reduce CO2 emissions.