Australian start-up offers new tire recycling solution

Melbourne, Australia – Green Distillation Technologies (GDT), a green technology start?up based in Melbourne, Australia, has developed a “proprietary technology” which is capable of recycling end?of?life car and truck tires into saleable commodities of carbon, oil and steel.

The GDT technology is known as “destructive distillation” and uses controlled heat to reduce whole tires to their constituent elements which then reform into oils which are distilled and collected, said a company release.

Carbon is the most abundant element in tire rubber and is delivered up in powder form of high purity. Steel that is used in tire manufacture is collected clean and unchanged. The process is entirely emission free.

According to GDT, the process plants are designed in modular form with a single module comprising two processing tubes and all the ancillary equipment.

A commercial scale plant consists of six of these modules and is capable of processing 19,000 tonnes of tires per year. This represents approximately 3 percent of the ELTs produced in Australia annually.

GDT claims that it is currently the only process available in Australia that remanufactures the rubber content of the ELT into a different energy form.

“Other processes merely change the shape and/or appearance of the rubber,” said a company announcement.

“The oil produced from the GDT process can be used as a heating fuel, direct into some stationery diesel engines or is capable of further refinement into better engine fuels. The carbon is a high grade product replacing other carbons sourced from fossil fuels. The steel is returned directly to the scrap steel,” concluded the company.

The Australian Government News website reported on 16 April that the technology had become the first ever Australian finalist in the Edison Awards – an innovation-centred prize – in New York.