Old car tires drive sustainable battery production
A Chilean start-up is reinventing the wheel, almost literally, recycling used car tires into modern electric car batteries. - REUTERS
Transcript
00:00 Across the globe, about 32 million tons of tires reach the end of their life each year.
00:07 That's enough to entirely cover Washington, D.C.
00:11 And the shift to electric vehicles, made heavier by their batteries, is only expected to increase that number.
00:18 One Chilean startup says its process could help solve the problem.
00:23 The company is called T-Fight, part of the privately funded Sustrend Laboratory.
00:29 Its solution to the annual problem of what to do with more than a billion end-of-life tires?
00:34 Recycle them into modern electric car batteries.
00:38 Their process involves refining carbon black, recovered from the tires by pyrolysis,
00:44 into battery-grade graphitic hard carbon, an essential component in the anode of lithium-ion batteries.
00:51 Bernadita Diaz is T-Fight's CEO and co-founder.
00:55 "Our process is innovative, mainly because we solve two problems.
01:02 One is the final disposal of tires, and the second is the demand that's being generated for electromobility materials.
01:14 And when you obtain materials from other waste, you're generating what's known as the circular economy."
01:22 Despite rising global rates of recycling in recent years,
01:27 hundreds of millions of end-of-life tires that are scrapped each year end up in landfills or in stockpiles.
01:33 That's according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
01:38 T-Fight says it has received significant interest from potential investors,
01:42 looking to scale up the process to an industrial level.
01:46 to an industrial level.