Danish onshore wind energy development firm WindSpace has formed a new company Elysium Nordic to create value from end-of-life tyres (ELT) by using pyrolysis technology to recover gas, steel, oil and especially carbon black from ELT.

The upcoming site will likely to emerge as one of the worlds’ largest pyrolysis plants in Denmark. It will be using the patented pyrolysis technology developed by Scandinavian firm Enviro Systems. 

The first pyrolysis plant will be built in the port of Nyborg located in Central Denmark in the next couple of years. The plant would be functional in 2021, with capacity to recover more than 9,000 tons of carbon black from 30,000 tons of ELT.

The plant will be the first step towards a more circular, sustainable and economically reasonable approach to the handling of ELT, in which the tyres are recycled instead of incinerated.

An estimated 3 million end-of-life tyres (ELT) are collected annually across EU countries. But the way they are processed is far from optimal. Although most of ELT are recycled, one third are still incinerated for energy purposes.

The consequences of not recycling ELT, is continued dependence on non-renewable resources such as oil and extensive CO2 emission to manufacture new tyres, posing environmental challenges and a poor economic model, as valuable materials from ELT tyres are lost.