Industrial Manufacturing News

At the European Tyre Recycling Association (ETRA) Conference 2007 in Brussels, Belgium it was estimated that the equivalent of 300,000,000 or more tires reach their end-of-life each year in the 27 member states of the European Union. It also estimated that similar amounts are found in North America, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East and that the global contamination total is probably over 1,000,000,000 passenger car tire equivalents per year.

For many of the past years these environmental hazardous accumulations were stockpiled or illegally dumped after receiving collection fees or government subsidies. As of 2006 the European Directives have banned scrap tires, shredded tires and tire residues from being landfilled or stockpiled.

However, ETRA reports that only 33% of these End-Of-Life tires are being recycled into recovered materials. Due to the abundant market pressures the only undesired alternative was to burn the tires. In the 1990’s a research and development co-operative program was conducted at the ABB/Alstom Production Laboratory in Naperville, Illinois, USA by John H. (Jack) Fader, now Director Technology of CBp Carbon Industries Inc. This focus on value-added material recovery by integrating thermal and mineral post-treatment technologies was then featured on CNN television.

Pyrolysis of scrap tires has not been commercially successful mainly because of the poor quality of the heterogeneous nature of the carbon rich pyrolysed by-product. In order to look for practical methods to post-treat the pyro-carbon into market products the European Union Cooperative Research (CRAFT) Recycle Tire contract GIST-CT-2002-50281 was initiated. After researching worldwide, the EU scientific team selected the products produced by CBp Carbon Industries Inc. as the “best-available- technology” to successfully complete their EU Recycle Tire project objectives.

The test results showed that the crude pyro-carbon was refined and upgraded to functional grades of reinforcing black fillers, CBpEX, CBpES and CBpEU which can be substituted and blended with N-500, N-600, N-700 and N-900 series of standard commercial carbon black grades.

The significance of this recognition of the patented CBp Carbon nano-carbon production technology breakthrough is that there is now a new large market potential for remanufacturing products from recycling tires. According to the latest Freedonia report the global carbon black market is forecast to rise 4.0 percent per year through 2008 to 9.6 million metric tonnes.

The final EU Recycle Tire accredited tests were from the CBp Carbon plant in Hungary which is presently being scaled up for increased capacity. Another plant is planned to recycle 100 tonnes per day or 30,000 tonnes of scrap tires per year. This will produce an additional 10,000 tonnes of CBp functional black reinforcing filler, a very small quantity considering the large carbon black market potentials.

However, another very important environmental benefit is realized from the improved CBp Carbon technology. Every CBp Carbon plant can now reduce or conserve approximately 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions that are released to the atmosphere by the current methods of burning oil or gas feedstocks for production of the equivalent amount of commercial carbon blacks. The CBp carbon products are physically recovered from the scrap tires instead of combustion.

The complete ETRA 2007 presentation, “New Reinforcing Black and Mineral Fillers Derived from Scrap Tires” can be seen on the CBp Carbon Industries Inc. web site home page: www.cbpcarbon.com

Plans are being made for additional CBp Carbon plants recycling tires in Europe, North America and Australia. CBp Carbon Industries Inc. is a publicly listed company traded on the NASD Pink Sheets symbol: cbpj.pk. For more information please contact us at: investor-relations(at)cbpcarbon.com or go to our website at www.cbpcarbon.com and click “investor info”.