Optimizing the development and performance of recovered Carbon Black for applications in "green" off-the-road tires

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The transport of goods and people is critical for the function of every modern society globally. With the exception of marine and rail transport, every other mode of transport requires vehicles to have tires. Consequently, it is estimated that nearly 5 million tonnes of waste automotive tires are produced in North America and Europe alone. Regrettably, recycling of "off-the-road" (OTR) tires used on vehicles in the mining, forestry and heavy industries until now has not been possible, due to the large size of the tires, as well as their very sophisticated construction. The Rubber Association of Canada (RAC) estimated that there are ~345,000 OTR tires in Canada with no known feasible solution for recycling, while the Canadian Association of Tire Recycling Agencies (CATRA) estimated that ~421,200 tonnes of waste tires were produced in 2019 in Canada alone. The proposed NSERC-Alliance project builds on a very successful 2017 NSERC-CRD project between Kal Tire Mining Tire Group (KT-MTG) and the University of British Columbia (UBC), which focused on the extraction and characterization of recovered Carbon Black (rCB) from OTR tires via pyrolysis. The specific objectives of the Alliance grant are to: 1) Develop and identify processing conditions for upscaling of treatments for the production of rCB originating from OTR tire pyrolysis, 2) Modify and characterize the newly prepared rCB to make it suitable for adaptation in industrial applications (e.g., plastics or pigments), and 3) Prepare rubber compounds (for possible use in tire retread applications) and test their performance in comparison to rubber compounds made with virgin CB. This work has a far reaching implications for the future possibilities of reducing the undesirable environmental impact of waste tires in Canada, reducing CO2 emissions by eliminating dependence on petrochemically-sourced CB, as well as pioneering Canadian technology to recycle OTR tires and repurpose the obtained rCB in the next generation of "green" tires.