GEM Fuels

Another type of depolymerisation process involves reducing the waste rubber from tyres back to its very basic chemical units of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. For example, a process for the conversion of waste tyre rubber into butadiene has been reported by GEM Fuels [21]. The process first converts the rubber into ethanol, which is oxidised to acetaldehyde, and then catalytically reacts with additional ethanol to generate butadiene. The butadiene can then be mixed with styrene in various proportions and copolymerised to produce virgin SBR, which has similar properties to the SBR used initially to produce the tyre. 

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