Recycling shredded used tyres and rubber waste into personalized recovered carbon black to limit use of fossil fuels and carbon dioxide emission
Rubber tyres have been with us for the last 130 years. Manufactured and used on a massive scale, they have a significant impact on our economy. But they also generate global problems related to handling of over 1.5 billion of used tyres every year, and consuming fossil fuels (mostly crude oil) to produce new ones. Only a small fraction of used tyres is rethreaded, while most end their life generating electricity or producing heat in steelworks or cement kilns, although generating high volumes of CO2. At Syntoil, we aim to change it by overcoming limitations of existing technologies and bringing to the market the continuous pyrolysis. We have developed a working limited-scale prototype with which we show how to minimize the emission of air pollutants, decrease the amount of necessary human labour in harmful environment, improve scalability and increase financial efficiency of the entire process. With CBreCycle, we go one step beyond that focusing on one of the main products of pyrolysis which is char (contaminated pyro-soot), rich in coal but containing ashes and other pollutants. As such, it is mainly used today to produce energy or a filler in construction despite being potentially a valuable recovered material. We developed a unique method able to recover Carbon Black (CB) from the char and replace traditional CB in tyre manufacturing and other applications. We do it at a price level lower than the market price of CB produced out of crude oil. Additionally, our cleaning technology allows for personalizing recovered CB which opens highly profitable applications in various industries. With our solution we can not only mitigate the use of fossil fuels but we minimise generated amounts of CO2. Within support from the EIC Accelerator we plan to develop an industrial scale demonstrator to confirm the scalability of our solution and prepare foundation for post-project commercialization addressing the new and rapidly growing rCB market worth nearly EUR 450M in 2023.