Tyres & Rubber

While we are all delighted at the prospect of a return to face-to-face BIR Conventions in 2022, our webinars over the last two years have proved invaluable in highlighting the wealth of innovation within the tyre and rubber recycling sector.

We have learned about Michelin’s BlackCycle project which has set itself the ambitious target of recycling almost 50% of Europe’s end-of-life tyres (ELTs) into new tyres just a handful of years from now, and about that growing band of businesses around the world which are successfully developing markets for various forms of non-ELT rubber scrap.

These developments have become even more important given the threat hanging over the crumb rubber infill market which, for many years, has absorbed a large proportion of the used tyres coming forward for recycling. Indeed, latest figures from the European Tyre and Rubber Manufacturers’ Association (ETRMA) covering 32 countries show that, of the 1.95 million tonnes of ELTs treated for material recovery in 2019, 1.36 million tonnes (or almost 70%) ended up in granulation processes.

Recycled rubber uptake has been boosted by the ever-growing number of brands which are looking to increase the recycled content of their new products in line with corporate environmental targets. This trend is certain to continue: for many companies in Europe and North America, environmental pressures have been trumping cost considerations for some time but, as we heard at the BIR Tyres & Rubber Committee webinar last May, the ecological imperative is now gaining traction further east too: Asmipudin Mohd Ali Jinnah of Malaysia-based Bridge Fields Resources told us that some Asian manufacturers are already willing to pay more for secondary raw materials so that they can put “recycled” on their product labelling; and fellow contributor Harsh Gandhi of major Indian tyre recycler GRP Ltd pointed to evidence of consumers allowing their suppliers more flexibility over recycled contents.

Our webinar in November last year offered a similarly positive perspective on recycled carbon black (RCB), with Germano Carreira of BB&G-Alternative Worldwide Environmental Solutions assuring us of the scope in the near future for RCB prices to exceed those of virgin carbon black in certain applications.

As in the plastics sector, therefore, we are seeing emerging potential for a permanent disconnect between recycled and primary prices, based ultimately on consumer pressure for more environmentally sensitive product manufacture. But as has been stressed by our regular webinar contributor Martin von Wolfersdorff of Wolfersdorff Consulting, success is still dependent on application performance and on how much recycled content can be incorporated into a new product without loss of key properties.

Despite the tremendous gains made over recent decades in terms of devising tyre/rubber recycling solutions and despite the positive shift in attitudes towards recycled materials, there are inevitable speed bumps along the road to continued progress. While the last couple of years have been unusual in many ways because of COVID, one constant has been the flow of retrograde legislation that has the potential to hinder the development and flourishing of recycling activities, including shipment regulations which inhibit cross-border movements of crucial secondary raw materials.

One solution for our sector could well lie in agreeing harmonized end-of-waste criteria for rubber derived from ELTs. Interested parties in several European countries have already pushed at the national level for firm criteria to identify the point at which tyre-derived rubber ceases to be waste and is categorized instead as a material. But as noted last October in a joint statement from the ETRMA and the European Recycling Industries’ Confederation, “a common starting point” for end-of-waste is essential to foster the circular economy and to increase the uptake of ELT-derived rubber in high-value end-use markets.

Meanwhile, our own Tyres & Rubber Committee, in conjunction with BIR, has sought to progress a dialogue at EU level aimed at introducing minimum recycled contents in rubber products. The possibilities must surely be worth pursuing given that I have seen with my own eyes how well this approach has worked for plastics.

Only through such innovative and unified approaches to demand-pull and control mechanisms will we create a sustainable global structure that extracts maximum benefit from recycling.