Waste tire remanufacturing: Quantitative‐aided qualitative sustainability analysis

Abstract

AbstractWaste tires contain a large amount of embodied energy and useful materials that can be recovered. In an existing remanufacturing process, the waste tire components are separated, thermomechanical devulcanization is used to restore the formability of the waste rubber for recycling, and waste rubber powder is mixed with chemical agents and subjected to hot rolling and extrusion to form rubber sheet products. Here, the quadruple‐bottom‐line sustainability of this remanufacturing process was studied for the first time based on the global availability of waste tires, and four technical alternatives based on different levels of automation and order of the processing steps were evaluated. The numbers of each machine for separating the tire components and processing the rubber were optimized. Quantitative sustainability analysis was conducted to calculate the sustainability index (SI) of four remanufacturing alternatives based on the technological feasibility of each processing step. Furthermore, a quantitative–qualitative sustainability assessment was performed to weight a criteria performance matrix of the technical alternatives qualitatively to overcome the lack of experience in the field. Waste‐tire remanufacturing has final SI values of ∼0.69–0.79, which exceed literature threshold values, indicating that it is a sustainable business strategy.