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The Commercial History of Tire Pyrolysis
From a 1970s fuel experiment to the fastest-growing stream in recovered materials — how pyrolysis became the answer to a tire's carbon.
Modern tire pyrolysis is fifty years old, but its roots are older than anything. Pyrolysis itself — heating material in the absence of oxygen — was practised in antiquity; carbon black production from soot dates to the ancients. The specific idea of applying it to tires, however, is a story of oil shocks, environmental law, and one decisive reframing.
The oil-crisis experiment
Modern tire pyrolysis was first developed during the 1970s oil crisis, with a simple objective: recover an alternative fuel from the rubber. It was an energy play — gas and oil out of tires — and it was modest in ambition because it ignored the solid residue.
The carbon question opens
The first initiatives to valorise the carbon-rich solid residue began. The realisation was simple but slow to land: a tire is not just fuel — roughly a third of its recovered mass is a carbon black that can go back into rubber and plastics.
The founding wave
Most of the companies active today were founded around this period — the same years regulation began closing the door on tire-derived fuel and landfilling, and opening it on material recovery.
Recovered carbon black gets a name
ASTM Committee D36 formally coined "recovered carbon black" (rCB) and began building the test methods, terminology and quality ratings — N900 to N100 — that let buyers and sellers speak the same language for the first time.
The marine-fuel shockwave
The IMO's 0.5% sulphur cap on marine fuels reset the value of low-sulphur fuel streams and redirected attention to pyrolysis oil as a blendstock — while also tightening the economics of every oil-linked substitute.
Mainstreaming
This is when the demand story inverts. Tire majors and carbon-black producers stop treating rCB as a novelty and start contracting for it; independent market work pegs recoverable European demand at hundreds of thousands of tonnes a year against supply measured in the tens of thousands. The bottleneck is no longer demand — it is proven, spec-grade capacity.
The arc is the point: what began as a fuel-recovery afterthought became the cleanest closed-loop answer to a tire's embedded carbon. The companies that matter today are the ones that crossed from the fuel logic of the 1970s to the material logic of the 2020s — and proved it at industrial scale.
Sources
- Notch / Wolfersdorff, "Prospects for Recovered Carbon Black" (3rd ed., 2024) — process history (1970s oil crisis, 1980s valorisation, founding timeline).
- Emerton, "Unlocking Recovered Carbon Black Potential" (May 2024) — demand vs. supply gap.
- ASTM D8178 / Committee D36 — recovered carbon black terminology and rating.
- IMO 2020 sulphur cap — marine fuel regulation.