For many in the tire industry, the target date for fully sustainable products and operations is 2050—and the clock is ticking.

There is no time to waste, as the solutions needed to bring about true sustainability to the sector won’t be easy to develop.

Nobody knows that more than carbon black producers, as the filler is the most prevalent material in tires outside of rubber itself.

Those who are working on such solutions know that the buzzwords that get thrown around when talking about a truly sustainable world often are just that: empty rhetoric if they don’t have money, action, and sound ideas behind them.

The form that those ideas will take remains a work in progress, and there are a variety of ideas that have potential.

But will they be able to check the necessary boxes of performance, scalability, and affordability?

And will the interim solutions look different than the more permanent answers that will be required by 2050?

To date, carbon black has been recovered via tire pyrolysis using end-of-life tires, but scaling the technology to the levels that major tire manufacturers will require remains a challenge.

Some companies like Monolith have shown that methane pyrolysis for carbon black (as well as turquoise hydrogen) is a promising avenue for more sustainable blacks.

In addition, recovered carbon black (rCB for short) is a function of ELT composition, and as such contains many virgin grades of carbon black, zinc compounds, and silicas.

And if those chemistry challenges are not enough, standard-making bodies like ASTM have yet to classify rCBs in such a way that rCB companies know what to produce and tire manufacturers know what they are buying.

But collaborative efforts like the one Bridgestone and Michelin have been working on since 2021 for rCB—releasing a joint white paper on the topic in September 2023—are what will be needed as the different pieces come together to make carbon black more sustainable by mid-century.

Other legacy carbon black companies—like Houston-based Orion and Boston-based Cabot Corp.—are focusing on the second byproduct of tire pyrolysis: tire pyrolysis oil, which has been used to create new vCB grades—both soft and hard blacks—on a commercial scale.

As Martin von Wolfersdorff, a leading consultant in the industry, says, the “utopia” of having one technology cover all sustainability possibilities doesn’t exist in the real world.

But unlike the buzzwords used in sustainability conversations, the solutions will be much deeper and far more complex.