Processing Waste Tires

The people making the claim at left say: This isn’t greenwashing. It’s patented, for-profit, and scalable tire recycling tech.

There is nothing scientifically impossible about what they’re saying here.  In fact, I promoted the gasification/pyrolysis of waste tires to potential investors all over the planet for about 10 years, until I finally gave up.

Candidly, I’m not sure why this entire enterprise has gone precisely nowhere, but I have three main ideas:

1) There’s a huge cost associated with collecting old tires that, in and of itself, probably makes the cost of the biofuel and other derived byproducts prohibitively high.

2) Our society provides essentially zero incentive for businesses that take waste out of landfills and reform it into fuels that compete with Big Oil.  The fossil fuel industry has made completely sure of that.

3) The creation of biofuels from rubber and other organic compounds is not an exact science.  Claims that people have developed “omnivorous” biomass eaters are largely bunk.