Recycling of Waste Rubbers into Value-Added Products

Abstract

Rubbers and plastics are the widely used polymeric materials for various kinds of applications such as automobiles, packaging, constructions, material handling, sports and toys etc. Because of long durability and ease of manufacturing rubbers and plastics are vigorously used in last decades. However, long term durability of these materials becomes a serious issue for the environment and treated as hazardous waste polymeric materials at the end of their life. Still these polymeric materials, showed the extensive critical problems due to unfruitful management. Among these, rubber waste is exponentially increase in past few year because of revolutionary changes in automobile industry and dependency of human over the automobile. To overcome this issue, land filling and combustion are the most employed traditional methods used for the disposing and treatment of rubber waste, respectively. Although, these methods showed several disadvantages such as evolution of toxic gases, dust, fumes and water pollution etc. Hence, the whole world is looking out for some of the best promising solutions to utilize these polymeric waste materials into value added products. In this regard, recycling and upcycling of rubber waste into value added products such as thermoplastic elastomers (TPE), value added fuels, additive materials for construction and carbon nanomaterials. Upcycling of waste rubbers into TPE showed one of the methods to get the value added products, however the incompatibility and immiscibility of the rubber based additives in polymer matrix show poor mechanical performance. On the other hand, upcycling of waste rubbers into value added fuels and carbon nanomaterials showed a potential remediation process for a wealthy management of rubber waste, while another way of recycling use of rubber waste in construction materials. Although whatever be recycling and upcycling process were suggested by various researchers, still a deep insight is urgently needed in order to confront the upcoming challenges of the rubber waste. Thus, the present chapter describes the detailed recycling and upcycling processes, challenges and future recommendations regarding the management of the rubber waste.