World’s largest tyre recycling company

Genan is the world’s largest scrap tyre recycler with four large recycling plants in Europa and the world’s largest tyre recycling plant under construction in Houston, Texas, USA. It is Genan’s vision that all scrap tyres in the world should be recycled in the environmentally and economically most beneficial way. Today, a large share of the scrap tyres in the world end up being incinerated in cement kilns, or disposed of in landfills or civil engineering operations, where the superior materials of scrap tyres are not recovered to replace new virgin material.

 

Comprehensive life cycle assessment studies have shown that significant environmental benefits in areas like greenhouse gas emissions, acidification and fossil fuel demand are achieved if scrap tyres are recycled through the Genan method instead of incinerated or used in civil engineering filling operations. Material recycling through the Genan method compared to other disposal methods saves 1-2 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of scrap tyres.

 

Genan’s recycling technology was originally developed in 1990 and has undergone continuous development ever since. The scrap tyres are separated into their basic components: rubber powder and granulate, steel and textile. The end products are uniform and clean and therefore very well suited for high quality substitution applications, such as asphalt and bitumen modification which makes the roads stronger and longer lasting. This leads to saved maintenance costs and less time spent on repair works.  The use of Genan’s rubber powder in asphalt and bitumen modification avoids the production of virgin alternative modifiers like styrene-butadiene-styrene.

 

The recycled rubber granulate is also being used as high-quality infill material for artificial turf pitches. The use of artificial turf is highly recommended by international soccer organizations such as FIFA since it helps the development of football in all parts of the world as well as provide the opportunity to play all year round at low maintenance costs.

 

However, even more interesting is the current cradle-to-cradle joint research development project together with the large tyre manufacturer, Pirelli, which hopefully will lead to the substitution of 10 % of all natural rubber in the production of new tyres. The last 5 years' price increase on virgin rubber has resulted in an increasing focus on raw material substitution and the preliminary results are promising.