Portugal – Versalis has signed an agreement with Bridgestone and recycling technology firm Grupo BB&G to establish a closed-loop ecosystem to transform end-of-life tires into new tires. About 1 billion tires reach the end of their useful service life every year.
The three partners said they are seeking a solution that provides innovative and more environmentally responsible ways to address increased sustainability in the synthetic rubber business, helping to maximize the complete life cycle of a tire.
Under the terms of the agreement, end-of-life tires will be transformed, through pyrolysis, into tire pyrolysis oil (TPO) to create elastomers comparable with those obtained from traditional feedstock for the production of new tires. The three companiesā€™ collaboration aims to boost the development of pyrolysis technology and TPO, as well as the market scaling of the elastomers as a valuable circular resource for new tires.
The partnership will leverage BB&Gā€™s thermomechanical pyrolysis process to recycle end-of-life tires on a commercial scale. BB&G has built and operated two generations of pilot plants in the past 10 years and has recently commissioned its first commercial-scale tire pyrolysis production to validate the feasibility and quality outputs of the process. In the coming months, initial amounts of BB&G oil will be fed into Versalis production plants to manufacture the circular elastomers that Bridgestone will use to create a first batch of tires in early 2025.
