How Norway's Wastefront is Reducing the Impact of 'End-of-Life-Tyre' Waste - CEO, Vianney Vales

Where do tyres go to when they're old and unwanted? The answer - they're either dumped in landfills or they're burnt in cement kilns. Both of these options are obviously highly damaging to the environment. Norway's Wastefront is offering a much more sustainable alternative.

"The solution can only come from recycling options that are simultaneously greener and at a large scale. The good news is this option is now available, through the recycling of tyres into valuable products while offsetting carbon emissions. This is what Wastefront offers," Vianney Vales, CEO of Wastefront, tells Auto Futures.

An estimated 29 million metric tonnes of vehicle tyres reach the end of their lifespan each year worldwide. Wastefront was founded in Oslo in 2019 with the ambition of reducing the environmental impacts associated with end-of-life-tyre (ELT) waste, while delivering a commercially viable solution to strategic partners on a global scale.

Through its recycling process, some of the components of ELT are turned into biofuels, called Tyre Derived Oil (TDO). The remaining parts of the tyre are completely recyclable into new tyres.

TDO can be sold as a biofuel due to the fact that almost half of the rubber originally in the tyre is of biogenic origin. However, to be incorporated into transportation fuels, TDO needs further refinement.

"This further processing is done in part at our plants and in part outside our plant, in partnership with Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trader which operates or supplies refineries around the world, and who Wastefront has a 10-year offtake agreement with," says Vales.

The company is also developing its own R&D program to further improve TDO, in cooperation with multiple international partners in Europe and in the US. 

"Compared with conventional diesel, diesel made from TDO produces an 80-90% reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Furthermore, it is a fuel produced by a fully circular process, and therefore also contributes to the growth of a worldwide circular economy and can be produced sustainably."

Building a Tyre Recycling Plant

The other end product of the process is a solid made up of Carbon Black - a powder that is originally in the tyres  - as well as of chemicals and additives, and a small amount of steel. Multiple processing steps results in the production of steel and of a very fine powder, called recovered Carbon Black (rCB).

rCB can be fully reutilised into tyres where it can replace the traditional Carbon Black produced from fossil fuel. 

In February, 2023, Wastefront secured planning permission to build an £100 million tyre recycling plant in the UK, which is set to be commercially operational by 2025. It will produce rCB alongside low carbon maritime and road transportation fuels. Construction will start on the plant later this year.

"Once fully in operation, the plant will be able to process around 80,000 tonnes of car and truck ELT material annually, avoiding the pollution of landfilling or incinerating of these tyres. The plant is expected to produce about 16 kilotonnes (kt) of scrap steel, 23kt of recovered carbon black, and 34kt of recycled fuels every year," explains Vales.

The operations of the plant will eliminate emissions totalling 1,800,000 tons of CO2 over its lifetime. It will also generate its own sustainable power, says Vales.

"To ensure positive contributions locally as well as globally, the project will be developed in close collaboration with the Port of Sunderland, local community, environmental agencies and other stakeholders, generating substantial investment and new jobs by using the port facilities to import and export products."

Becoming Fully Circular

Wastefront has partnered with ENSO, a UK-based company that produces sustainable tyres for electric cars, to provide them a recycling outlet for their used tyres. The strategic partnership will also see ENSO incorporate Wastefront’s rCB into their new EV tyres from 2024. 

"We teamed up with ENSO under the shared vision of  endorsing the need for technological innovation in tyre design given the overwhelming need to recycle and reuse the materials tyres are made from," says Vales.

Wastefront and ENSO have set up a technical collaboration between their R&D teams to develop more sustainable solutions for EV manufacturing.

"This collaboration will focus on accelerating better ways to use rCB, developing and utilising rCB’s properties to increase EV performance, increasing the amount of recycled materials in tyres, and reducing the amount of toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in tyres," he adds.

Finally, we asked Vales what transportation will be like by the end of the decade.

"From 2030 people in the UK will not be able to purchase vehicles with combustion engines, so all conventional petrol and diesel car sales will be banned. This legislation will improve air quality and reduce car pollution and is a game changer in the way transportation will evolve. But introducing more circularity in all our activities is equally important to support the EV transition," he predicts.

"Many other current shortcomings of transportation will have to be solved, such as the emissions of particulates through tyre wear, or the CO2 footprint of EV car manufacturing, to name a few."

"Transportation will become cleaner, not only because of engines being electric, but because all underlying processes will become fully circular," concludes Vales.