Turning Old Tires into Gold - Breakthrough in Tire Recyling

You wouldn’t expect a breakthrough in tire recycling to come from Turkey. But researchers at the Tubitak Marmara Research Centre in Gebze, Turkey, have come up with one, reports the Economist. Old tires which usually end up in landfills are being recycled with sand to create silicon carbide, a material that can sell for up to $13,000 a ton. Silicon carbide, known commercially as carborundum, has diamond-like properties. It is used to form abrasives used in cutting tools, bullet-proof vests and ceramic brakes in sports cars. It is also used as a semiconductor in high-voltage applications. The old tires are not burned but instead are gasified. Burning a tire by contrast, produces sulphur dioxide, a noxious pollutant. The resulting mixture is then mixed with sand and heated in a syngas-fired oven. The result is high-grade silicon carbide. Tubitak is one of nine collaborators in what is known as the TyGRe project, a European Union-financed endeavour intended to make useful things out of redundant rubber. The project was started as a way of dealing with the 325,000 ton of tires sent to landfills across Europe each year. Ironically, the Economist magazine’s latest cover story lambastes just these kinds of government financed green projects as a waste of money, unnecessary government interference in the marketplace, and doomed to failure. The Economist has a giant octopus on the cover with the headline, "Leviathan Inc – The State goes back into business." The Leviathan article defines projects such as the Turkish tire venture as industrial policies. I disagreed with their conclusions in an article here at Benzinga, entitled The Economist Magazine’s Attack on Industrial Policy. Check it out: http://www.benzinga.com/life/politics/10/08/419123/the-economist-magazine%E2%80%99s-attack-on-industrial-policy In an approving tone, the tire article’s author exclaimed, if old tires can now be turned into something useful, ‘this TyGRe (the European Union project) will really have earned its stripes.’