Carbon Black Turns Green: How G3C is Offsetting Emissions in the Tire Industry
Sustainability and mitigation of climate change have rightly become chief concerns across economies, as advocates and entrepreneurs alike recognize not only the existential necessity of preserving the environment and preventing runaway greenhouse gas emissions, but also the business opportunities these trends represent.
Specifically, the transportation sector accounts for about 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and if the recent IPCC report is to believed then transportation is among the top areas that need addressing today to stave off the worst effects of climate change. When considering methods to green the transportation sector, the usual ideas include shifting to electric vehicles, improving fuel efficiency, and encouraging more travel via mass transit options. But what about the wheels that drive emissions in the transportation sector? Literally– what about the wheels? That’s the under-the-radar question being asked by G3C Technologies, who strive to address the harm from the billions of tires that reach the end of their life every year in a more complete, environmentally-friendly, and profitable manner than has been previously accomplished.
Really? What effect do tires have on climate and the environment?
Studies estimate that 1.76 billion new tires are manufactured each year, with such great quantity needed because the typical tire only lasts three to six years before needing replacement. Handling these truckloads of end-of-life (EOL) tires quickly presents a host of environmental concerns. Of the heaps of EOL tiers (outside of the ones that get retreaded and exported), the final destinations break down thusly:
About 15% of EOL tires end up in landfills, contributing to issues of soil deterioration and a diminishing availability of space to continue such dumping.
Another 23% of EOL tires get disposed of or reused in such manners that attempt to embrace sustainability, through uses like mulching and paving with shredded tires, ground up for rubber applications like sports fields and road pavement, and other well-intentioned efforts, but these methods can contaminate soil and groundwater.
Roughly 11% of EOL tires are shredded for use in civil engineering applications like road and landfill construction, though these applications again come with concerns of soil and water pollution.
Most concerning, though, are the 46% of EOL tires that are disposed of through incineration. Upon incineration, a passenger car tire releases 22 kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) and a truck tire emits 110 kg of CO2, which alone would mean up to 18 million metric tons of CO2 emissions by 2020– equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions from 3.9 million cars or from the entire power sector of Maryland.
Source: AFS technology
None of these destinations for EOL tires are environmentally neutral, covering a range of deleterious effects to the planet. Preferable options do exist to handle EOL, though, in the form of processing used tires with industrial conversion techniques to create carbon black, but less than 1% of scrap tires are treated with this process today and the quality of the material produced is not nearly as high-quality as it potentially could be. However, G3C Technologies believes they’ve developed the next step in such conversions that will make this process more ubiquitous and environmentally-friendly.
G3C’s efforts to deflate the emissions coming from the tire industry
For decades, the scrap tire industry has looked for convenient methods to dispose of or reuse tires in such a way to maximize their profits and minimize their operating costs. Government regulators, meanwhile, have stepped in to enforce a certain base level of environment responsibility in the disposal of tires. The G3C technology is looking to go further, though, by providing an elevated manner in which to provide old tires brand new life beyond just recycling the scraps in a manner that not only minimizes environmental harms and captures CO2 emissions that would otherwise have been released, but also provides a unique business opportunity.
Source: G3C Technologies
As background, new tires are made of a material called carbon black, which is created through a specific type of incomplete fossil fuel combustion. After tires reach the end of life, they’re either stored for many decades in landfills, remade into products that can use degraded rubber, or burnt– and that’s the end of the process. What the G3C technology achieves instead is taking that sad linear life of a tire and turns it beautifully (and fittingly) into a circle. G3C takes scrap tires and chemically/industrially breaks them down to produce a material known as recovered black carbon (rCB). This renewed material can then be used to make brand new tires or other products typically requiring ‘virgin’ carbon black, such as plastic auto parts, paints, and semi-conductive parts– epitomizing the concept of circular economy and metaphorically turning the need for a ‘virgin birth’ of new carbon black into one of reincarnation.
The technology behind G3C is proprietary and requires an understanding of the complicated chemical and manufacturing processes, but an advanced degree is not required to recognize that the environmental and market advantages such technology offers are game-changing:
Production of 1 kg of virgin carbon black produces 2.4 kg of CO2 emissions, while the creation of rCB emits just 20 to 30% of that total, minimizing the carbon footprint of new tire production. For context, 2018 global production of virgin carbon black is estimated at 12.8 million tons, which would create 30.3 million tons of CO2– equal to the emissions from all 2016 electricity generation in Minnesota.
By making use of recycled rCB instead of virgin carbon black, material prices for new plastic and industrial rubber products drop.
For EOL tires, disposal through the G3C process of turning them into rCB prevents the environmental harms of dumping and recycling, while eliminating the emissions from incineration from the carbon accounting sheets.
Source: PPEC
The concept of creating rCB from tires is not a new one, but G3C Technologies claims their R&D has enabled them to elevate this process to a never-before-seen level. Unlike any other conversion process, the G3C technology can supposedly produce rCB with properties (such as surface area and structure) that far surpass those of previous iterations of rCB and even of comparable quality to virgin carbon black. Such high-grade rCB would, for the first time, allow manufacturers to replace virgin carbon black used for high-standard rubber, plastic, and specialty products with rCB, since previous versions were too low-grade.
In this way, G3C enables resultant products that are necessary for everyday societal functions to be manufactured in a more climate-friendly way by completing the loop of circular economy– new tires turn into EOL tires which are converted into rCB to create new tires once again.
Who’s behind G3C and what’s the next step to roll the tech out?
G3C Technologies has accomplished these breakthroughs thanks to their expert team of scientists and engineers that stretch from the New Jersey-based U.S. team and the lab and equipment manufacturers in the Republic of Georgia. Led by Founder and CEO Vitaly Khusidman, G3C Technologies was established in 2015 and the years since have been spent acquiring funding, hiring their all-star team, optimizing their process, receiving numerous patents, and preparing for commercial deployment.
R&D concluded earlier this year and the company is preparing for their next stage of fundraising to bring their technology to market, having just launched a crowdfunding investment campaign with StartEngine on November 15, 2018. I’ve written on the topic of crowdfunding as a method for sustainability-related projects to get off the ground a number of times, and if G3C Technologies can harness the lessons learned from sustainable crowdfunding campaigns– both successful and unsuccessful— then they very well could be the next big success story in green crowdfunding.
Source: SDSN Youth