Rubber Recycling Industry
This can be a highly profitable industry with raw materials in abundant supply. The major source of raw materials is old tires and waste from the rubber products manufacturers.The traditional way of recycling rubber waste is the Reclaim process. This is where the carbon chains are broken into smaller chains. This Reclaim rubber is used as a cheapner of rubber compounds and in general you could replace up to 30% of your original virgin rubber with reclaim rubber to lower your cost of manufacturing rubber products while showing a high rubber content.
An Alternative Process
An alternative process would be to break the sulphur bonds in the waste rubber material, by a 'devulcanising' process, in order to 'restore' the material to it's original uncured state. In theory this should gives us the original properties. In practise some additional compounding is required to bring back most of the original properties. Hence this process can be used to produce a 100% substitute for virgin rubber instead of being a filler or cheapener for rubber compounding.
Past Production
I was manufacturing this type of 'devulcanised' rubber in 1998, during the Asian Currency Crisis. Then, we were supplying a car mat manufacturer with the recycled rubber. They used to stock our material for upto 3 months before using it with their car mat formulation. We were achieving Tensile Strengths of 10 MPa to 16 MPa when tested with standard formulations. The variations were in part due to cheaper price for lower quality. I believe we could achieve tire compound quality material from waste tires.
Hence we have proven that 'devulcanised' rubber is commercially viable.
Philosophy
The philosophy is that we do not want to compete with the Reclaim suppliers as this is a different ball game, altogether. We want to deliver good quality compounds and substitutes for virgin rubber.
The Potential Market
I had on one occassion obtained 18MPa strength of recycled rubber. This is the mininmum quality for tire compound. Imagine us processing waste tire powder into tire compound for companies like Dunlop, Brigestone, Continental, ... these are just the big players in the rubber industry and there are many smaller players looking for less expensive substittes for virgin rubber. At the end of the day, synthetic rubber is a product of black gold. As price of petroleum increases due to scarcity, synthetic rubber prices increase. And when this happens natural rubber prices follow in tandem. The market potential for recycled rubber is really enormous..
Factory Started !!!
http://www.oocities.org/b_achutha/rubber
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