In the recent part there have been a great shift towards sustainable production, leaving manufacturers searching for fresh sets of ways to turn out to be greener. Virgin carbon black is massively used in rubber, paints, plastics and coatings for pigmentation and reinforcement purposes. However, virgin carbon black is somewhat produced from oil and even natural gas which is unsustainable. A recovered carbon black (rcb) gets sourced from end-of-life tyres and offers a proper solution to this problem via the use of more sustainable type of feedstock.
You should know that every single year more than one point seven billion tires reach the end of their lives and end up in simply the landfills polluting the environment. Hence, reusing the tires for overall recovery of Carbon Black and other chemicals turn out to be paramount to ensure a healthy environment, sustainability in Carbon Black manufacturing, and even a step towards a circular economy. Until lately, there were restricted to no sort of significant efforts made to bring the consumed tires into the recovery overall of Carbon Black. In the last couple of years, there has been an increased cry for sustainability in overall operations and circularity in economic activities. Amidst the overall manufacturers, many manufacturers are there who are already engaged in bringing eco-friendly practices into their operations, renewability, and even concrete actions toward recycling Carbon Black.
What really is carbon black?
Carbon Black has been a highly and greatly versatile product catering to many different key industries, including paints & coatings, automotive, adhesives & sealants, and recently its increased usage in battery production. Manufacturers globally have been much vigilant in grasping the market opportunity and expanding production capacity. In the present time , Carbon Black manufacturing is a massively environmentally degrading process in which 1 Metric ton of Carbon Black is simply generated using 1.2-1.5 Metric loads of fossil fuel (generally residual heavy oils derived from petroleum refining operations, the distillation of coal tars, and even the production of ethylene) and huge quantities of water, and in turn, the production process releases 3 Metric tons of overall Carbon dioxide coupled with other gases and harmful sort of chemical compounds. To curb the release of regulated compounds, encompassing Sulphur Dioxide and even Carbon Monoxide, the companies conventionally use combustion, that generates useable energy as a by-product.
Moreover, the market of the carbon Black is projected to show modest growth till the time of 2027. The Rubber Carbon Black market is definitely expected to grow by two to three percent while whereas the Specialty Carbon Black market is definitely forecasted to grow with four to five percent CAGR for the aforementioned years.
Rubber Carbon Black has definitely a major end-use in the realm of tire industry. The total global Capacity of Carbon Black has somewhat been nearly thirteen point five million metric tons, including both rubber and even specialty Carbon Black. Thus, the requirement to integrate recycled or recovered Carbon Black into the overall different value chains turns out to be more paramount than ever. Thus, this is high time to simply join the recovered Carbon Black into different types of value chains not just to meet the Carbon Black demand but to even restrict environmental degradation.
An integral part
Well, carbon Black has been an integral and important part of the tire manufacturing process as it gets used as a rubber reinforcing agent to offer enhanced level of tread durability, reduce rolling resistance, and even better level of traction. Over two point five billion tires are produced yearly, and every tire includes nearly three kg of Carbon Black that amounts to seven point five million tonnes of Carbon Black in tires. Thus, one willingly available source of Carbon Black is End of Life Tires (elts); however, the adding of mineral additives during the overall tire manufacturing posed a significant challenge during the overall recycling of elts to simply recover Carbon Black. So, conventionally, using elts to produce energy has been the one and only economically viable option. However, there has been great progressions and advancement in technologies towards the demineralization of elts and even extraction of highly purified Carbon Black from overall elts, and to make use of the recovered type of Carbon Black (rcb) in tire manufacturing and even other sorts of industrial applications. Of course, these recovered options are making a great impact.
Recycling Carbons encompass making use of mostly elts (End of Life Tires) to generate pyrolysis oil and then even employing it to generate both specialty and rubber Carbon Black one thing that you should know is manufacturers of Carbon Black on their own cannot simply bring all the elts into the value chain and even close the loop in the tire and rubber industry, other stakeholders encompassing recyclers must also partake and ensure better level of collection rates and enhanced recycling so as to incorporate sustainability and fight climate change. Instead of that, Bolder Industries, Black Bear Carbons, and even others have increased to the occasion and have been going from strength to strength towards establishing recovered Carbon Black facilities.
Moreover, the main difficulty in order to recover Carbon Black from elts has been simply the leading presence of mineral ash in the realm of Carbon Black, which is added during the time of tire manufacturing as additives to reinforce further and blend simply Carbon Black. However, in recent times professionals have come up with a process to demineralize the recovered type of Carbon Black. The recovered type of Carbon Black from their demineralization process is going to be free of any mineral residue and can be even used in tire manufacturing without making any use of any virgin Carbon Black.
Important to know that earlier, nearly ten percent of the recovered Carbon Black might get used in tire manufacturing; however, after the mentioned demineralization process, recovered type of Carbon Black can fully replace the primary material.
Conclusion
To sum up, it is the era of sustainable carbon black and it is making its way in nearly all the industries. More and more industries are seeing potential and effectivity in recovered type of carbon black.
