Marubeni invests in tire recycling

The Japanese conglomerate Marubeni has become an investor in Green Rubber Energy (GRE), a company that specializes in the pyrolysis processing of end-of-life tires in Thailand.

According to Marubeni, 30 million end-of-life tires are generated worldwide every year, with a large number being disposed of in landfills or incinerated, posing a significant burden on the environment. For this reason, various countries are tightening regulations on tire disposal, and manufacturers are seeking to increase the use of "green" raw materials to reduce environmental damage. In light of this, technologies that enable the reuse of old tires as raw materials for the production of new tire products are gaining increasing attention.

GRE has been working to improve its pyrolysis processing technology for over 10 years, producing recovered carbon black (rCB) and tire pyrolysis oil (TPO). As Marubeni notes, it was previously considered technically challenging to apply rCB as a raw material for the tire industry due to unstable quality caused by impurities, but GRE has solved this problem.

With the new investment, Marubeni aims to establish a tire recycling chain in Thailand, from collecting old tires to producing and selling recycled raw materials such as rCB and TPO. Marubeni B-Quik, the largest automotive maintenance company in the country, will collect end-of-life tires and pass them on to GRE, which will produce rCB and TPO, with purification being carried out using technology from German RCB Nanotechnologies GmbH, in which Marubeni invested in 2024, and the materials will be sold by Marubeni Techno Rubber. In the future, it is planned to implement this business model in Japan, Southeast Asia, and other regions. Not long ago, Bridgestone also announced the launch of a similar project.

GRE was founded in 2007 and is currently capable of processing up to 10,000 tons of tires per year.