Japan’s Bridgestone has announced plans to construct a pilot demonstration plant for tyre recycling at its plant in Seki City, Gifu Prefecture. The plant will start operating in 2027 and is expected to start construction in 2025, it will have a capacity of 7,500 tonnes.
The facility will demonstrate the technology needed for establishing and optimising pyrolysis of end-of-life tyres, which involves obtaining tyre-derived oil and recovered carbon black (rCB) from end-of-life tyres.
Since 2022, Bridgestone says it has been advancing its efforts in chemical recycling of end-of-life tyres. In 2023, the company introduced a test unit at the Bridgestone Innovation Park (BIP) in Kodaira City, Tokyo, and it has been further developing technology to obtain tyre-derived oil and rCB through testing precise pyrolysis of end-of-life tyres.
The oil is refined to produce chemical products, such as butadiene, a raw material of synthetic rubber. This creates the possibility of reusing and recycling the oil and the rCB as raw materials of tyres.
The new pilot demonstration plant will implement the technology of pyrolysis demonstrated at the test unit of BIP and the firm aims to establish scale-up technologies for mass production of tyre-derived oil and rCB.
The construction of this pilot demonstration plant is one of the R&D projects selected by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation (NEDO). It is also part of a joint project with Eneos Corporation.
Meanwhile in related news, it has tied up with Tokai Carbon Co and Kyushu University to perform secondary processing on recovered carbon black (rCB) extracted from polymer products such as end-of-life tyres containing rubber.
The project aims to convert these materials into eco carbon black (eCB) with rubber reinforcement properties equivalent to those of virgin carbon black (vCB) that is derived from petroleum and coal.
Efforts are already underway to pyrolyse polymer products including rubber from end-of-life tyres to recover and reuse rCB. However, practical application of rCB in new tyres still faces challenges.
Among them, rCB has lower rubber reinforcement performance compared to vCB, primarily due to the presence of numerous impurities. Additionally, although many end-of-life tyres are effectively utilised as fuel through thermal recovery, this process leads to CO2 emissions. With the anticipated growth in automotive and transportation demand, tyre demand is expected to rise correspondingly in the future. These efforts are focused on enhancing resource circulation by further enabling the recycling of vCB, a key raw material for tyres.
In this project, Tokai Carbon will leverage the technologies and expertise it has developed through carbon black manufacturing, combining them with the knowledge and technologies of Bridgestone, Kyushu University, and Okayama University.
Together, the joint project members aim to develop technology to remove impurities from rCB and produce eCB with superior rubber reinforcing properties.
The project’s objective is to establish a demonstration plant capable of producing 5,000 tonnes/year of eCB by fiscal year 2032. Additionally, the project will focus on developing special polymer/carbon composites that enable the reuse of carbon black without the need for pyrolysis of end-of-life tyres.