Unwanted Rubber Tires Are Everywhere and Even Visible From Space

Photo by Boris Misevic on Unsplash

The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.

Rubber tires should be recycled, but more often than not they are simply dumped into landfills or on-site at industrial locations. Some of them find their way into the world’s oceans.

You can even see the results of this from space. The world’s largest tire dump site is in Kuwait, where about 42 million unwanted tires currently reside in the desert and can be seen by the likes of William Shatner or Jeff Bezos from the stars above.

Even tires discarded at sea are trapping hermit crabs inside them.

The existence of such a huge amount of discarded tires highlights a massive problem of what to do with all that unwanted rubber. It’s a problem Pittsburgh-based Smart Tire Recycling (STR) says it is poised to solve with its green technology designed to recover one very important product from such unloved tires.

That product is recovered carbon black (rCB). Newly mined carbon black is widely used in the production of rubber tires, and STR says its rCB is just as high quality as the original material.

Zero-Emission Technology Advantage

Not only that but STR’s rCB recycling technology has zero emissions, according to the company.

Newly mined carbon black, conversely, produces some of the most toxic emissions known, STR said. About 70% of mined carbon black is used in the tire industry by companies such as Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. GT and Bridgestone Corp. BRDCY. The carbon black industry is worth $20 billion with continued growth expected to take that figure to almost $26 billion in 2025.

Up to now, a technique known as pyrolysis has been used to obtain rCB. The problem, according to STR, is that yields have often been disappointing using such technology. Its technology, by contrast, produces highly sustainable yields of rCB. The company remains confident it can produce the large amounts of rCB required by the tire industry in the U.S., where only about 7% of the industry’s needs for recycled products are currently met.

The company, a mixture of engineers, scientists, and financial professionals, said it is aiming to become the largest producer of rCB in the next 5 years with production locations across the U.S.

Once commercialized, the company says it will make money both from the tipping fees it will earn from processing unwanted tires from landfill sites and from revenue raised by producing the rCB, oil, and steel in its recycling technology process.

STR states that it has raised more than $325,000 so far in a crowdfunding campaign. Individual investments start at $249 with bonus perks at various investment tiers going up to $100,000 plus.

As for all those abandoned tires in Kuwait? The good news is that they are being moved to another site close to the Saudi Arabia border where recycling will occur.

The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.