News: Weibold Academy

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.

Regardless of meandering political environmental protection trends, most Western companies today are embracing Corporate Environmental Responsibility (CER) as a mandate that is integral to their corporate strategy and forms part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program. The automobile industry and its subset, the tire industry, is no exception. Consumer awareness represents pressure on corporate governance to continuously improve the environmental footprint throughout the life cycle of their products. Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) are one way of objectively quantifying and qualifying the effect that material and energy flows of a given product have on our environment, our health, our economies, and the way we live. LCAs also help design the products we and our customers manufacture, compare them to competitive solutions, and enhance their perception in the market. If performed properly, the investments that LCAs require can therefore ultimately translate into improved profit margins. This article examines the difficulties we encounter and gains we can realize when performing an LCA on an End Of Life Tire (ELT) derived product.

During 1st quarter of 2020, Weibold is going to host online webinars designed for everyone who is interested in tire recycling and pyrolysis. If you are a newcomer to tire recycling or pyrolysis industry, you can profit from Weibold’s webinars by gaining knowledge about output, value-added products, regulations, machinery, feedstock, financial aspects of running the business, and other important aspects. But also experienced tire recycling and pyrolysis operators will receive useful insights on how to streamline production and operations, upgrade technology setup, add value to current materials and products, apply for grants or look for funding.

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.

Tire pyrolysis is a complex capital-intensive business which requires much know-how and which is rather challenging to successfully run today. However, we are convinced tire pyrolysis has a bright future ahead. First, let’s consider reasons which make this business challenging. In the OECD countries, tire pyrolysis is hampered mainly by national regulations. For instance, in Germany, fuels obtained from recycled rubber are banned for use in vehicular engines.

Today, many developing countries suffer from poor waste management practices and severe environmental problems. This includes not only insufficient wastewater treatment, dangerous chemicals in soil or solid household waste, but also end-of-life tires (ELTs) which, accumulated at landfills, pose threat to human health. Whereas fraught politics is incapable of designing scrap tire management regulations and establishing collection systems, there are other practices which could help. To affect scrap tire management and recycling on local level, one should come up with solutions tailored to people’s economic behavior and habits, and look at their economic needs. This is where crowdsourcing for ELTs comes into play.