![]() This process, originally designed to make new silicones using very small quantities of a catalyst, has been repurposed to address the sustainability of petroleum-based tires.ĭiagram showing the steps in this new process for breaking down rubber tires. The silicones selectively cut the sulfur-sulfur connections, leaving only organic chains that can be easily isolated and reused to create new products. In my lab, the Brook Research Group at McMaster University, we have discovered an efficient and mild process that uses silicone chemistry to break the sulfur-to-sulfur bonds that hold tires together. That reliability on the road makes tires extremely difficult to recycle. We now expect tires to last 100,000 kilometres. Prior to advances in automobile design, notably the advent of steel-belt and radial profiles 50 years ago, tires would need to be replaced after 20,000 to 40,000 kilometres. Vulcanization uses sulfur chains to bridge large organic molecules into a network, and is still widely used to produce automobile tires. In the 1840s, Charles Goodyear discovered a process called vulcanization that converts soft natural rubber into hard wearing rubbers. Such fires aren’t uncommon: another notable tire fire happened 30 years ago, when 14 million tires in Hagersville, Ont., burned for more than two weeks. ![]() 20, 2019, a difficult-to-control fire broke out at the TRACC tire recycling plant in Minto, N.B., where approximately one million tires were stored. Problematically, many tires end up in tire landfills where they risk contaminating the local environment through leachate ( the liquid that percolates through waste sites and into the ground) or worse, through fires that release toxic gases and particulate into the atmosphere. These are inefficient ways to utilize a non-renewable resource. Some old tires are used as fuel in the cement industry or ground into rubber crumb and used as a reinforcing agent - parents will be familiar with the rubber mats used in children’s playgrounds. Automobile tires are the classic example of a high-volume product derived from non-renewable petroleum resources that is designed for single use they do not fit the desired paradigm of reduce, reuse, recycle. Approximately three billion automobile tires were produced worldwide in 2019 alone.
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