The process draws on end‑of‑life tyres collected across Germany, from some Driver retail outlets and motorsport activities, as well as scrap tyres collected from Pirelli’s Breuberg plant. They 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 circular materials’ reintroduction into the manufacturing of new Pirelli tyres, maintaining their highest standards of quality and performance.
Pirelli, Pyrum, Synthos and BASF are advancing a tyre-to-tyre circular economy initiative in Europe using end-of-life and scrap tyres.
The chain converts tyres into recovered carbon black and tyre pyrolysis oil for certified circular materials.
The ISCC PLUS-certified loop supports recycled-content inputs for new Pirelli tyre production.
Within this process, Pyrum converts end‑of‑life and scrap tyres 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 tyre 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 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 perfectly 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, driven by Pirelli, build a coordinated system in which materials are recovered, transformed and reused by maximizing their inner value.
The European tyre‑to‑tyre project represents the most comprehensive application of this approach to date, demonstrating how end‑of‑life tyres can become a valuable resource within a structured and traceable industrial loop.
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ALCHEMPro News Desk
