Overview of the World Rubber Recycling Market

To help appreciate why so much research and development (R D) activity has been targeted at recycling tyres it is informative to look at a few fundamental statistics. In a recent presentation by Sekhar [1], the following figures were shown that highlight the global problem that waste tyres represent today  

Other global statistics have been used to provide simplified life cycle assessment descriptions for the rubber industry. For example, Brown of Watson Brown HSM Ltd [2] has provided the following global estimates for recycling  

With regard to consumption, although accurate figures for rubber materials and products are hard to obtain for the world economy due to the complexity of the market and the fact that economic factors play such an important role in determining the market price that exists for the raw ingredients at any one point in time, rough estimates place the split in the consumption of NR and all synthetic types of rubber at approximately 40 60, with the dominant synthetic 

The large amounts of NR and SBR consumed by the world economy is due to the fact that they are the main tyre rubbers , with the tread compounds of tyres (particularly those of passenger vehicles and trucks) usually being sulfur-cured compounds based on these two diene-type rubbers, sometimes with an amount of another diene rubber (polybutadiene) added to improve properties such as flex crack resistance. 

With respect to the amounts of waste that are generated by end-of-life tyres, it has been estimated that in the USA around 3.3 million tonnes of tyre waste are generated per year, whereas the figure in the European Union (EU) economic area is 2.5 million tonnes, and in the UK alone it is around 0.5 million tonnes [4]. 

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