Vow ASA and European Tyre Enterprise (ETEL) are joining forces to tackle the global environmental challenge of end-of-life tyres.
The partnership aims to convert these tyres into valuable raw material and renewable energy, offering a sustainable solution for handling end-of-life tyres and decarbonising the tyre industry.
Murfitts Industries, a subsidiary of ETEL and the largest collector and processor of end-of-life tyres in the UK and ETIA, a subsidiary of Vow, have been working together for several years to develop a full industrial process in which end-of-life tyres are valorised into a premium recovered carbon black.
The partnership is defined in a memorandum of understanding (MoU) and Vow will provide its Biogreen reactor technology to the projects.
ETEL, an international tyre and automotive service, maintenance, and repair group and subsidiary of Japanese trading company Itochu, plans to deploy the solution in Europe, North America, and Japan. These regions represent a market of 8.6 million tons of end-of-life tyre or more than 300 industrial tyre recycling plants. ETEL has already identified the first three locations for these plants and is in the process of obtaining building permits for them.
"Together with Murfitts, ETEL and Itochu, we are forming a unique British-French-Japanese-Norwegian partnership," said Henrik Badin, CEO of Vow ASA. "We see a huge opportunity for Vow technology and our combined competence and capacity in a rapidly emerging market."
Every year, 30 million tonnes of end-of-life tyres are generated globally, with around 30% of the tyre composition being virgin carbon black, produced by cracking fossil oil. Major tyre manufacturers are looking to replace part of the virgin carbon black with recovered carbon black in tyre production, and the partnership between Vow and ETEL offers a promising solution to this challenge.
Pyrolytic oil and syngas, the two other products generated in the tyre recovery process, are also valorised into low carbon fuel or synthetic naphta to generate new low carbon molecules.
