Michelin and Murfitts Industries today announce a new project to process end-of-life tyres, recovering the energy and materials within them. As part of the project Murfitts has submitted plans for a materials recovery facility at Michelin’s tyre plant in Stoke-on-Trent.
Murfitts Industries
The cutting-edge process developed by Murfitts will generate energy which will be used to power Michelin’s production on site, thereby lowering CO2 emissions from the factory by 1,500 tonnes per year. In addition to the energy recovered, the process will also produce recovered carbon black (rCB) and tyre pyrolysis oil (TPO).
The project will see Michelin supply Murfitts with 12,500 tonnes of end-of-life tyres per year, the equivalent of 1.35 million car tyres. For context, the plant’s capacity would be more than enough to reprocess a pair of tyres from each of the 602,000 cars currently registered in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire.
The new plant will use those processes at a commercial scale to recover the raw materials through pyrolysis – breaking down tyres through thermal decomposition without oxygen. The rCB produced can be used for a wide range of products, including new tyres, and the TPO can be used for other materials and for alternative fuels, reducing the need for virgin petroleum feedstock.
Mark Murfitt, founder of Murfitts Industries, said: “We believe this plant could be a breakthrough in the life cycle of a tyre. It moves tyre recycling on from recovering energy and material for other uses to being able to feed it directly back into factories for new tyre production."
He continues, "Our core ethos at Murfitts has always been that end-of-life tyres are a valuable resource and we need to do all we can to maximise the use of the energy and materials within them. We have been developing our pyrolysis process for a number of years and our results now show we can produce material from end-of-life tyres which can perform better than the virgin equivalent for some applications. This plant will be a win-win for the tyre industry, the local and national economy and the environment.”
The process also produces steam which will be supplied directly to the Michelin factory. This will replace the natural gas currently used to create steam for the curing phase of tyre production, reducing the need for fossil fuels.
Christina Peloquin, Site Director at Michelin UK, said: "This is a really exciting project which reduces our environmental impact at the same time as helping us stay competitive by lowering our energy costs. The team has worked exceptionally hard on this project, and we're looking forward to welcoming Murfitts to our Stoke-on-Trent site."
The facility is expected to be fully operational by the end of 2026.