The BlackCycle project has an upcycling ambition, targeting to create a circular economy of the end-of-life tyre (ELT) into technical applications like tyre industry by producing high technical second raw materials (SRMs) from ELTs. A key lever is to consider the circular economy of tyre domain: recycle ELT into new tyres. Known technologies in this domain are today limited and this new research project will have the ambition to pass their roadblocks, and deliver new technical raw materials relevant for tyre production or other technical products. This project will proactively integrate these new materials (SRMs) and validate that the progress in all the key tyre performances having environmental impacts is not slowed down. The BlackCycle project aims at creating, developing and optimising a full value chain, from ELT feedstock to SRMs, with no waste of resources in any part of the chain and a specific attention for the environmental impact. Eventually, close to 1 out of every 2 ELT will go through this new recovery process which will be the only virtuous cycle of this magnitude amongst all industrial sectors in the recovery of end of life products. In effectively implementing this change, the European tyre industry will be a world leader in a more sustainable tyre production. Indeed, the main product obtained at the end of the project would be a new tyre where many raw materials come from ELT. In particular, the carbon black, a material representing ~20% of tyre composition, will be fully obtained from oils extracted from waste tyres through the pyrolysis process. Furthermore, several chemical and plasticizers will also be obtained from pyrolytic oil refining. The final product would have a high added value from an environmental point of view, because more than 25% of the total weight would come from recycled ELT.

Waste disposal is one of the biggest problems that the world is facing. Increasing population, urbanization and industrialization are accelerating drastically the generation of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). Landfilling is the usual method but is the least recommended option since they release GHG, contaminates the soil and ground water, produces unpleasant odours and spread pathogenic microorganisms. Recycling is unable to deal with the huge amount of garbage produced. Mass-burn incineration eliminates waste but emits highly dangerous dioxins and furans creating major social opposition. Composting is limited to large fractions of organic waste and is very odorous. Most of the gasification plants that started to operate have shut down failing to provide a solution to the problem. New clean and cost-efficient technologies to dispose this huge amount of garbage are urgently needed. PYROCRACK uses a patented Pyrolysis process to treat MSW obtaining a mixture of liquids, gases and solids with high energy content and a novel Thermal Cracking process that improves the quality of this mixture. Pyrolysis decomposes waste without using O2 which avoids pollutant emissions. Thanks to its endothermic feature it transforms waste into high value products that can be commercialised in the industry making of PYROCRACK a flagship of the Circular Economy. Pyrolysis has been known for centuries but now it is the focus of the MSW treatment business because of the inability of the existing techniques to respond to the ever-growing generation of garbage. Our approach is disruptive since we will treat MSW in a distributed manner through profitable and clean small/medium plants located closer to households and businesses to transform the content of waste into usable products (biochar, syngas and power). Our aim is to reach a gradual and scalable market implementation in Solid Waste Market of the PYROCRACK technology so has to reach a ROI of 6,59 and a payback period of 2,25 years.