Tire recycling circular economy strategies are entering a critical phase, where innovations in pyrolysis and global partnerships are unlocking the full potential of sustainable material recovery.

GREENVILLE, S.C.—Well over 350 million passenger or passenger-equivalent tires in the U.S. are discarded every year, according to Liberty Tire Recycling data. And if you take the average weight of those tires being about 22 pounds, that’s about 7 billion to 8 billion pounds of waste.
This doesn’t even factor in larger truck/bus, off-the-road, or agricultural tires.

The numbers are growing, with units increasing by 1-3 percent annually, according to Liberty data. The tonnage increase, however, is at a rate of about 4-6 percent per year due to growing rim sizes and the development of heavier tires to accommodate the weight of electric vehicles.

“There’s no other industry that puts out that kind of output back into the environment,” Andrew Meurer, president and chief commercial officer at Liberty Tire, said of the U.S. tire industry during the recent Clemson University Global Tire Industry Conference.

And that output could come back to haunt tire makers.

Before joining Liberty Tire Recycling in January 2024, Meurer worked with Michelin North America Inc. for 12 years as vice president of sales for the North American tire division.
And while working at the world’s No. 1 tire maker, Meurer had determined in a strategy meeting that the most significant risk to the industry could be the very products it sells.

“The one thing that we felt could disrupt the industry and our positioning in the industry was end-of-life tires,” he said. “And the reason we got there is because, for a company that is as good and as phenomenal at making tires and selling tires as Michelin is, we didn’t know where those tires were when we sold them. We didn’t know where they were going.”

And if those tires are not disposed of properly, Michelin’s Bibendum could become the poster child of tire fires or illegal disposal practices, among other concerns, he said, emphasizing that it was important for Michelin to become more involved in finding solutions for ELT.

At the time, Meurer said, despite leading the tire maker’s passenger tire sales in North America, he had little to no understanding about the tire disposal process.

He said he desired to understand more about the ELT industry, which ultimately led him to Liberty Tire.

Along his journey to better understand tire recycling and ELT solutions, Meurer has determined that tire recycling is a key component. However, still an “immature” industry in terms of overall growth, it is at a tipping point.

The Phases of Tire Collection

The tire collection and recycling industry has evolved through four phases, according to Meurer, from simple tire collection and disposal to the industry’s current focus on processing tires into valuable byproducts.

The first phase, Meurer said, was about as simple as it gets.

“People would take their tires off their car at the tire dealer, and then some guy would come by in a pickup truck or a van or whatever he had, … take (the tires) to a landfill, and the landfill would say, ‘sure,’ and toss them in the landfill.”

Whatever money the collector received from the tire dealer, minus the cost of transportation, was profit.
“Because of this, there was virtually no barrier to entry,” Meurer said. “Anybody who had a truck or a vehicle could go and do this.”

Then, landfills began regulating what they accepted and started charging for disposal, which marked the start of the tire collection industry’s second phase.

This brought significant change to the industry, Meurer said, because as landfills began charging and regulating disposal, they especially didn’t want tires for a multitude of reasons, including animals getting trapped in the tires, air pockets, and trapped water.

“(Tires) did not work in landfills very well,” Meurer said. “So they required all tires coming into the landfill not only to pay to be in there, but also they need to be cut up.”

And this is not an easy task, nor is it a cheap one.

Here, the industry began to see consolidations as single proprietorships started coming together to pool resources and collections, affording them the ability to purchase shredders.

“I call that the start of the processing phase,” Meurer said. “Phase three is the byproduct space.”

As collectors began shredding tires, the “more entrepreneurial collectors” noticed that the bits of rubber falling off the machines could be used as byproducts, such as rubber mulch or as an additive to infield products.

As collectors determined that they could sell the rubber scraps, the industry began developing machinery to separate steel and other materials from tires for sale as byproducts.

“To make a long story short, over the last decade or so, the tire collection industry has gotten good at breaking down tires and driving out these byproducts,” Meurer said. “You can take a tire, sell the steel, they’ve found markets for the fiber for the most part, and they can grind that crumb rubber … into the finest baby powder-like material that can be used for a multitude of products, from molded goods to rubberized asphalt.”

The industry has even come full circle, he said, by experimenting with crumb rubber in carbon black, a critical material for tire performance.

Which brings the industry to the infancy of today’s fourth phase: the product development phase.
“We’re very early in this development phase,” Meurer said. “There’s currently only enough processing machines, there’s only enough molding equipment, there’s only enough demand to manage a tiny percentage of that 7 (billion) to 8 billion pounds (of scrap tires) that are going up every year.”
That’s to the tune of about 10-20 percent, he said.

But while the percentage is small, he added, the potential is “huge.”

At a Tipping Point

Several challenges hinder the acceleration of the tire recycling industry, including the public’s limited understanding of tire recycling and proper disposal methods. Additionally, educational outreach to consumers is minimal, Meurer said.

“The average person out there, they know nothing about it,” he said, reminding conference attendees that even he knew little about the industry before joining Liberty Tire.

Then there are “irresponsible collectors” who either ship waste tires offshore to countries with little to no regulations on the matter or continue to dump the tires illegally, Meurer said.

But the industry is at a tipping point because “consumers, retailers, manufacturers and our government are realizing there needs to be something done to accelerate this.”

While the industry isn’t well understood by the average person, consumers are learning more about ELT every year, and they’re demanding change, Meurer said.

“And the manufacturers … are starting to realize that their responsibility doesn’t end when they sell the tire,” Meurer said.

Michelin certainly has.

A spokesperson for Michelin informed Rubber News after the conference that today, the tire maker is involved in several initiatives to find solutions for ELT.

“Michelin is taking steps to develop the end-of-life tire recycling ecosystem and promote circularity in the rubber industry,” she said in an emailed statement. “The group is involved in ground-breaking projects, in tandem with various partners.”

These partnerships include: a joint proposal with Bridgestone Americas Inc. to increase the use of recycled carbon black from ELT; a joint venture with Antin Partners and Scandinavian Enviro Systems A.B. to industrialize the pyrolysis technology developed by Enviro; its investments in its Atlanta-headquartered Lehigh Technologies, which recycles end-of-life rubber products into micronized rubber powder; and its contributions and research toward the European Union-funded BlackCycle project, which aims to develop secondary raw materials from ELT.

“Your responsibility ends when you know where your product is ultimately going and (you make) sure that it’s being responsibly dealt with,” Meurer said.

And if the consumers, retailers, and manufacturers don’t do anything to accelerate the tire recycling industry, governments are “hot on the trail of end-of-life tires.”

Connecticut, for example, passed an Extended Producer Responsibility (ERP) law for tires in 2023 that was expected to begin this year—the first in the nation of its kind, according to the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection (DEEP).

ERP is a mandatory form of product stewardship driven by government oversight that shifts end-of-life financial and management responsibility upstream to manufacturers, away from the public sector, for certain products, according to DEEP. It also provides incentives to manufacturers to incorporate environmental considerations into the designs of their products and packaging.

“If that sweeps across the United States,” Meurer said, “…that would also ultimately change the face and accelerate end-of-life tire disposal.”

Tire recyclers, he said, are in the “crucible” of multiple forces coming together, which is motivating more investments and involvement toward ELT solutions.

“Where they were once only collectors, they’re now collectors and processors. And where they’re now collectors and processors, they’re moving into (making) end products,” Meurer said.

Learn more:

• Recovered Carbon Black: Market Insights
• KleanLoop™ Blockchain for Tire Circularity
• End-of-Life Tire Pyrolysis Solutions
• Reoil + Zeppelin Circular Tire Alliance

Join the Circular Tire Revolution with Klean Industries

The global tire industry is at a tipping point, rethinking old models and embracing advanced recycling technologies. At the forefront of this evolution is Klean Industries, delivering turnkey tire pyrolysis solutions that enable full circularity, transforming scrap tires into recovered carbon black, tire-derived oil, and green steel.

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• End-to-End Circularity: Proven technology that closes the loop from tire to tire.
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