Technology Review:  Used rubber ground into particles for new rubber, plastics

The April 20 edition of MIT’s Technology Review features Lehigh Technologies process for rejuvenating discarded rubber, including tires. According to the article by Phil McKenna, nearly 300 million tires are discarded in the United States each year, more than half of which “end up either as landfill or are burned for fuel in cement kilns and in other industries.”

Tucker, Georgia-based Lehigh Technologies’ new process for recycling rubber “could open up new recycling opportunities. If the company's technology catches on, it could carve out a billion-dollar market for high-performance recycled rubber,” McKenna wrote.

The first commercial facility was opened by Lehigh in 2006. It has the capacity to produce “100 million pounds of rubber powder and to process four million tires per year.”

Lehigh CEO Alan Barton told McKenna that an estimated 30 million tires now on the road in the United States are made with his company's recycled rubber, but only about 3-7 percent of the rubber in these tires is from Lehigh’s material.

That’s mainly because Lehigh's rubber is still technically vulcanized, meaning “carbon atoms in the rubber are still bound to sulfur atoms, and these bonds prevent them from forming covalent bonds with surrounding materials.”

But Lehigh is looking to change that.

Read the full Technology Review story here and discover what Lehigh's investors are particularly interested in. Talk to me about it in the comments section that follows the Lehigh images.

—Mac Ackers

Editor’s note: Lehigh Technologies supplied us with additional images. Here they are: