Every year about 1.5 billion tyres are discarded worldwide representing a large amount of solid waste, but also a largely untapped source of raw materials. The objective of the method was to prove the concept of a novel scrap tyre recycling process which uses molten zinc as the direct heat transfer fluid and, simultaneously, uses this media to separate the solids products (i.e. steel and rCB) in a sink-float separation at an operating temperature of 450-470 degrees C.
This methodology involved:
construction of the laboratory scale batch reactor,
separation of floating rCB from the zinc,
recovery of the steel from the bottom of the reactor following pyrolysis (C) 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).