A new partnership has been announced that is advancing a tire-to-tire circular economy initiative in Europe, driving the development of an industrial ecosystem designed to increase the use of recycled materials derived from end-of-life and scrap tires.
Pirelli, Pyrum, Synthos and BASF are working together on a process that draws on end-of-life tires collected across Germany, from some driver retail outlets and motorsport activities, as well as scrap tires collected from Pirelli’s Breuberg plant. These are processed through an industrial chain designed to maximize their inner value, converting them into secondary raw materials, including synthetic rubber, certified under the ISCC Plus scheme. This ensures traceability along the value chain and enables the reintroduction of the circular materials into the manufacturing of new Pirelli tires.
Within this process, Pyrum converts end-of-life and scrap tires through a pyrolysis process, a high-temperature thermal decomposition of materials in the absence of oxygen, into two valuable secondary raw materials: recovered carbon black (rCB) and tire pyrolysis oil (TPO). The recovered carbon black is upgraded in quality and directly reintroduced into Pirelli’s European production, partially replacing virgin carbon black.
At the same time, the TPO is supplied to BASF, where it is co-fed with fossil-based feedstock into the production process of chemical products such as butadiene and styrene. A mass balance approach enables attributing the recycled content to the company’s ISCC Plus-certified Ccycled products. These circular materials are then used by Synthos to produce ISCC Plus-certified synthetic rubber for high-performance tire applications, which Pirelli reintroduces into its production processes, closing the loop.
The project reflects that genuine product circularity cannot be achieved by a single company acting alone. It requires creating industrial ecosystems involving players with complementary expertise, each contributing to different phases of the transformation process around a shared material loop. Through collaboration and the combination of technological innovation, material science and certified processes, the partners build a coordinated system in which materials are recovered, transformed and reused by maximizing their inner value.
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