Crumb Rubber is a manufacturer of high quality rubber powder and crumb

Using the figures they quote (180,000 tyres, 4000t of recycling activity) an annual cost saving in the region of £10 million pounds will be saved in raw material costs by replacing prime rubber compound with in-house buffings.  The average usage per tyre seems a little high, at over 22kg per tyre, but it’s good to see such a big commitment to increasing rubber re-use and we hope to see more manufacturers switching part of their raw materials to fine crumb rubbers.

Elsewhere soy bean flour and oil have been investigated as replacements for petroleum and mineral components of rubber compounds, with soy bean becoming the plant of choice for all kinds of sustainable consumption projects

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/smartphone/article.aspx?id=8514369

It was also reported that a large proportion of these end-of-life tyres (ELTs) is converted either into rubber granulate or into energy for use by the cement industry, but this is slightly at odds with the European Tyre and Rubber Manufacturing association (ETRMA) 2011 report which claims that stockpiles and illegal dumps represent nearly two years worth of used tyres, so it’s not necessarily the case that ‘destined for recovery’ in the BIR report translates into ‘actually recovered’. 

One suggestion was to litter the space between paragraphs with valuable keywords like fine rubber powder and innovative UK manufacturing in hidden white lettering that gets picked up by Google, but wouldn’t scare a casual reader off.  

Well we’re proud of what we do so I’ll ignore that advice, sorry. In fact, let’s remind people that our highly technical and environmentally friendly reclaimed material can be used in a wide number of applications to: 

We also see positive things like some manufacturing returning to the West from the Far East, the constant flow of information and activity in “advanced manufacturing” which is excellent but it is possibly missing the opportunity to look more closely at materials not just processes (albeit some of the latest ideas are very clever!).

Nick has joined us as Business Development Manager from Brenntag Ltd. He has degree in Manufacturing Technology and Materials with over 25 years experience in the materials and polymers industries. His contact details are on the “Contact Us” page of the website.

Most thermoplastic prices have softened in the later part of 2011 but we start 2012 with the indications that most polymers will at best be stable and in some cases start to move back up again in price. Therefore the rationale for researching how formulation costs can be reduced does not go away and it could be argued that now is the time to find ways to improve things before the cost pressure really hits.