Circular Economy Collaboration & Co-Creation Innovation & Technology

Bridgestone Partners to Create Closed-Loop Ecosystem for Tires

The collaboration will see end-of-life tires transformed through pyrolysis into elastomers, which Bridgestone can then use to produce new tires.

Published 3 months ago | About a 4 minute read

Image: Andrea Piacquadio

This week, Bridgestone EMEA — the European arm of the world's largest tire and rubber company — established a partnership agreement with tech company Grupo BB&G and Italian chemical giant Versalis aimed at establishing a closed-loop ecosystem to transform end-of-life tires into new tires, and creating a model for a scalable and increasingly sustainable supply chain.

According to the WBCSD’s Tire Industry Project, roughly a billion tires reach the end of their useful service life every year — end-of-life tires (ELTs) make up nearly 2 percent of total global waste, leading to environmental and health hazards due to improper waste management. Bridgestone, BB&G and Versalis are seeking more environmentally responsible solutions for maximizing the complete lifecycle of a tire.

“At Bridgestone, we have set a goal of working with 100 percent sustainable materials by 2050, and recycling and reusing products is an important part of this,” said Laurent Dartoux, Group President Bridgestone EMEA and Global Sustainability Initiative Lead at Bridgestone Corporation. “The partnership with Grupo BB&G and Versalis to research, implement and overcome the challenge of recycling tires will contribute towards this target. The collaboration also supports Bridgestone’s corporate E8 commitment, along with our global EVERTIRE initiative, which focuses on co-creating new and environmentally responsible ways to maximize the complete lifecycle of our tires.”

This new, European collaboration builds on Bridgestone Americas’ partnership with carbon-capture and -transformation (CCT) leader LanzaTech — aimed at developing a business model around post-consumer waste-management for end-of-life tires, while increasing adoption of sustainably sourced chemicals for commercial applications and reducing dependency on virgin fossil feedstocks to enable true circularity for end-of-life tires here in the US.

Through the partnership with BB&G and Versalis, ELTs will be transformed — through BB&G’s thermomechanical process of pyrolysis — into tire pyrolysis oil (TPO) to create high-quality elastomers comparable to those obtained from traditional feedstock to produce new tires. The three companies’ collaboration aims to boost the development of pyrolysis technology and TPO, as well as scaling availability of the polymers as a valuable, circular resource for new tires.

BB&G — which has built and operated two generations of pilot plants in the past 10 years — recently commissioned its first commercial-scale tire pyrolysis production plant in Fatima, Portugal to validate the feasibility and quality outputs of the process. Over the next months, the first amount of BB&G oil will be fed into Versalis’ plants to manufacture the circular elastomers that Bridgestone will use to create a first batch of tires in early 2025. The BB&G TPO commercial plant will help improve the circular tire ecosystem and play a crucial role in facilitating global tire circularity.

Versalis — a wholly owned subsidiary of Italian oil supermajor Eni — has been developing circular technologies and processes through polymer recycling, including through complementary mechanical and chemical recycling. The company is also engaged in the diversification of feedstock through both renewable sources and secondary raw materials. Through this collaboration, Versalis will integrate BB&G’s pyrolysis oil into its own supply chain thus expanding its ISCC PLUS-certified Balance® product range; Bridgestone can then transform these elastomers into tires with an enhanced percentage of rubber obtained from secondary raw material.

As part of the collaboration, all three companies will be working together to research and realize the best technical solutions to establish a successful ecosystem for future recycling of end-of-life tires on a large scale.

“This strategic partnership with Bridgestone and Versalis is a huge step towards achieving our visionary goal of accelerating tire recycling worldwide,” said BB&G CEO Germano Carreira. “It confirms the value of our patented technology and acknowledges the persistence that has brought us to this crucial point, enabling us to expand our technology across different regions. This collaboration is not just about advancing our products; it is a joint effort to increase circularity in the industry, aligning with global sustainability goals.”