Recycled Carbon Black for Tires
Green and Circular Economy: Dunlop and Cabot's Circular Transformation Practice
Amidst the global push for "dual carbon" targets and the tire industry's green transformation, Dunlop and Cabot signed a Memorandum of Understanding on January 22, 2026. This collaboration serves as a prime example of the industry's commitment to a circular economy through technological innovation, with its core objective being to reduce reliance on petroleum-based virgin carbon black and build a closed-loop resource cycle for the tire industry.
Tire production demands a huge amount of carbon black. Traditional petroleum-based virgin carbon black not only consumes fossil resources but also generates significant carbon emissions. Furthermore, the resource utilization of waste tires has long faced technological bottlenecks. As the world's largest tire producer, my country generates 16.4 million tons of waste tires annually, but its recycling rate is only about 50%, and the industry has long been plagued by a fragmented and disorganized structure.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has promoted the transformation of waste tire comprehensive utilization towards large-scale and high-value-added processes through the selection of standardized enterprises. Currently, 82 standardized enterprises have an annual processing capacity exceeding 5 million tons, laying the policy and industrial foundation for this type of cooperation.
The core of this collaboration lies in Cabot's patented recycled carbon technology. Leveraging the Evolve sustainable solutions platform, it deeply processes recycled carbon black generated from the pyrolysis of end-of-life tires into recycled reinforced carbon materials. Traditional recycled carbon black suffers from unstable performance, limiting its addition ratio to 10%-15%.
Cabot, through process optimization, has achieved stable performance at addition ratios exceeding 30%, producing products comparable to ASTM N300 series virgin carbon black, resolving the core contradiction between recycled materials and tire safety performance.
Sumitomo Rubber, Dunlop's parent company, will conduct mass production tire compatibility assessments of this material. The technical teams of both companies will collaborate closely to advance commercialization, while Cabot will simultaneously expand its production capacity to meet potential market demand.
This collaboration precisely aligns with Sumitomo Rubber's "To Wa Now A" circular economy strategy, integrating the strengths of both companies in tire manufacturing and carbon black technology to create a closed-loop value chain from "waste tires - recycled carbon black - new tires," achieving closed-loop resource utilization.
From an industry value perspective, this collaboration overcomes a key bottleneck in the high-value application of recycled carbon black. While pyrolysis technology is the mainstream approach for waste tire processing, traditional products have low added value.
Cabot's technology, however, elevates recycled carbon black to the ranks of high-end tire raw materials, significantly improving resource utilization efficiency. This practice also aligns with my country's large-scale equipment upgrade and consumer goods trade-in policy by 2026, setting a benchmark for the industry's transformation towards "material recycling."
Currently, the tire industry is transitioning from extensive recycling to standardized circular economy. The collaboration between Dunlop and Cabot demonstrates that technological innovation and cross-industry collaboration are key to overcoming resource dependence.
In the future, as the cooperation deepens, achieving a larger proportion of recycled carbon black application will provide a replicable model for carbon reduction and energy conservation in the tire industry, propelling the industry towards a true circular economy and injecting practical momentum into the green transformation of global manufacturing.
