New partnership to market liquid hydrocarbons made from recycled tyres

Vitol and Wastefront, a Norwegian waste tyre recycling company, have unveiled a 10-year offtake agreement for the production of liquid hydrocarbons and certain non-liquid products to be produced at Wastefront’s first waste tyre recycling plant in Sunderland, on its completion in 2023.

In addition to the offtake agreement, the companies have also established a framework agreement for the 10-year offtake from future waste tyre recycling plants to be developed and built by Wastefront.

Vitol will buy all available liquid hydrocarbons, including naphtha, distillates and bunker oil, from the first plant in Sunderland – expected to have an annual processing capacity of 60,000 tonnes of waste tyres – from which it is expected that Vitol will buy a volume of up to 30,000 t/y of products. Both companies plan to optimise sustainability elements in the value chain and to utilise existing and future national and supranational emission reduction schemes.

Wastefront’s plant will be the first to combine conventional methods with the company’s own proprietary process, which is claimed will minimise the environmental impact typically associated with traditional tyre pyrolysis.

The estimated 29mn tonnes of vehicle tyres which reach the end of their lifespan each year represent an under-reported but major cause of pollution due to their non-biodegradability. By converting tyre waste into usable commodities, Wastefront offsets carbon emissions, with the alternative to recycled commodities being crude oil.

Wastefront’s Director and Co-Founder, Christian A Hvamstad, comments: ‘Our ambition is to create a new circular economy for dealing with waste issues… Together, we can contribute to a cleaner future by dealing with a specific waste problem, where end-of-life tyres no longer end up in landfill, but instead are converted into viable commodities that can be used again.

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