Team:Brasil-USP/Practices/CBL

CBL

Policy and Practices

Scrap tire recycling company

    CBL Reciclagem is a brazilian company, the biggest of Latin America in its market, that has been working on scrap tire recycling market and rubber waste in order to attend the Resolution 258/99 of the National Environmental Council - CONAMA, which established that for each tire imported or produced in Brazil, a scrap tire must have an environmental friendly destination. 1 They have seven units in the country and we visited the one responsible for grinding the tire and separating its rubber from steel. This is the first step for recycling. A big machine swallow the tire and expels smaller units of rubber mixed with steel. The particles passes through a separation process that reduces the quantity of steel in the rubber, generating their product.

Figure 1: CBL facilities.


    The biggest part of it is bought by cement companies to be burned as fuel and a parcel goes to the other units to be reprocessed, purified, and shredded uniformly, in different standardized size classes, to be used as raw material to make shoes, carpets, soil addictive and asphalt. The use as asphalt is a very sustainable alternative but it still does not present good market due its price, which is higher than conventional materials, besides its better quality. The grinded tire generated from the first separation process costs approximately U$0.10/kg and the price rises to U$0.50/kg after other processes of grinding. Curiously, the natural rubber price was also around $0.50/kg in São Paulo state in September 2014 2. Unfortunately, nowadays technologies present lower quality compared to non-recycled materials due natural oxidation, and as the price are almost the same, there is no economic incentive to use these recycled materials. The amount of tires is so huge that they work the whole year, 24 hours, everyday. It was a very enriching experience for our team because we could watch part of the tire cycle and discuss the market scenario with highly specialized people. We saw the importance of our project and how it would positively impact the environment and the tire recycling industry, providing new alternatives to complement current technologies. They offered their specialties to analyze our bio-devulcanized rubber and opened the gates for a partnership in future.

Figure 2: Grinded tire provided by CBL.


References

1 http://www.mma.gov.br/port/conama/res/res99/res25899.html
2 http://www.iea.sp.gov.br/out/LerTexto.php?codTexto=13598

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