Turn Old Tyres into New Ones
TYRES. They are on our cars, buses, trucks and motorcycles. Yet, how many of us actually know what happens to them once they outlive their usefulness?
The issue of scrap tyre recycling is often placed down the pecking order after the primary worries of illegal logging, open burning and other forms of pollution. Granted, they may form only a small part of our lives but stacking these unwanted rings of rubber up into a pile will give a sense of what many nations are struggling to deal with – or get rid of.
According to a 2010 report by the European Tyre and Rubber Manufacturer’s Association, 1.4 billion tyres are sold worldwide each year. The life of tyres can be extended through retreading or regrooving but eventually, they will become scraps. Traditionally, tyre scraps end up in landfills or an energy recovery system. Each of these methods, though beneficial, creates its own set of dilemmas. Burning tyres as an energy resource or even stockpiling them increase environmental risks. This is merely passing on the bother to another party, with a comprehensive and sustainable solution nowhere in sight.
Innovations (SRI) was founded by local rubber technology legend, the late Tan Sri Dr B.C. Sekhar. When he passed on in 2006, his son, Gopinath B. Sekhar took over the company, focusing on developing a process that enables the reuse of materials from scrap tyres.
The breakthrough for SRI came after five years of endeavour when they successfully created the “SRI compound”. Recycled from tyres and waste rubber, the compound can be used to make new tyres, retread old ones or make automotive parts.
The process of creating the compound begins with cutting and grinding up scrap tyres into crumb rubber. The crumb rubber is then put through the SRI Activation Process to create premium rubber which can be used in a range of products once it is mixed in with the manufacturer’s virgin compound.
Sekhar uses the analogy of cake baking to describe the process: “A scrap tyre is like a baked cake. Eggs, flour, sugar and other ingredients are used to make the cake batter. Once baked, it is impossible to turn the cake back into batter because the properties of the ingredients have changed.
“It is the same in rubber product manufacturing where natural rubber, synthetic rubber, carbon black, chemicals and sulphur are mixed together into a compound. The compound is put in a mould and the mould is heated up for a specified amount of time at a specified temperature to vulcanise it into a finished product. This finished product material cannot be reverted back to the compound it initially was.”
But what if there is a method to convert the cake into batter? This method is what the people at SRI has developed.
From the outset, Sekhar knew that he needed to face the problems head on to create a workable product. “The high volume of scrap tyres around the world is vulgar. Companies have come up with different methods of dealing with them but none are completely feasible or sustainable,” says the 49-year-old chief executive officer.
To effectively solve the issue of disposing scrap tyres, the new process has to cope with the high volume of tyres discarded every year. SRI head of business development Anthony Umann points out that most methods up until now “have never scaled beyond niche applications”. Existing devulcanisation technologies do not address the problem as the volumes they can effectively process are far too low. SRI overcame this by creating a high-volume processing system applicable to major manufacturers around the globe intending to use their technology.
The environmental implications of ill-managing tyre wastes should not be taken lightly. “Some 70% of the world’s rubber demand is from tyre manufacturers,” says Umann. As such, disposal methods, such as burning and dumping tyre wastes, which cause an enormous amount of pollution, are plainly solving a problem only by virtue of creating another one.
For lack of a better alternative, the bulk of discarded tyres is burnt as fuel to heat cement kilns and paper pulp factories. Sekhar says burning tyres to obtain energy is wasteful. “These tyres could be recycled and made into other products. Burning them is essentially burning away money.”
Besides being a terrible waste of raw material, this process creates various forms of toxins and carbon dioxide which are harmful to the environment. The SRI Activation Process is a closed loop recycling process that reuses 100% of the scrap tyre – including fibre, metal and rubber. This leaves no wastage of valuable materials, creates zero pollution and leaves a low-energy footprint.
With the SRI compound, manufacturers can save costs by substituting a portion of their natural rubber compound with the recycled one, without compromising the quality or value of a product.
Sekhar says the tyre manufacturers need not change their processes when using the recycled compound. Tests on tyres made with the recycled compound showed good results.
The process won the 2010 Asia Pacific Technology Innovation Award for Tyre Recycling Technology by Frost & Sullivan. SRI intends to patent its technology and promote it among major tyre manufactures worldwide.
“We want to change the concept of scrap tyres. We see people collecting paper, glass and plastic for recycling but the scrap tyres would be left there as people do not see any value in them. One day, waste tyres will be considered as useful raw material. Instead of being a problem we find difficult to get rid of, it will be an opportunity instead,” says Umann.
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