Sustainable Development Goals
Current Project Status:
Development Started 2023 | Feasibility Study | Pre-FEED
Organizations Involved:
Klean Industries, KBR, Viva Energy, CEVA Logistics, CMA CGM, InvestVictoria, Sustainability Victoria, Tyre Stewardship Australia, Several Tyre Recycling Companies
Services:
Design & Engineering, Component Supply, Feasibility Study, Due Diligence, Supply Chain Management, Operator Training
Klean Industries is developing a cutting-edge tyre pyrolysis plant in Australia. The plant aims to process end-of-life tyres into valuable commodities such as recovered carbon black and renewable fuels, thereby advancing sustainable waste management and supporting the circular economy.
The Challenge:
It’s no secret that Australia has a massive waste problem that is out of control, and disposal fees continue to rise. End-of-life Tyres (“ELT”) and Non-Recycled Plastics (“NRP”) are piling up and are being dumped in landfills all over the country, with some of these materials being exported to be burned and dumped in foreign countries. Klean aims to solve this environmental crisis by teaming up with strategic partners to combine their skillsets to create meaningful change that will help Australia develop a low-carbon, circular economy while reinforcing the goal of zero waste to landfill. We see significant opportunities for creating hundreds of new and highly skilled cleantech jobs with enough project opportunities in Australia to invest billions of dollars into the Australian economy over the next decade.
Australia accumulates over 450,000 metric tonnes of end-of-life tyres annually, or approximately 50m scrap tyres annually. That’s enough waste tyres to build 8-10 commercial-scale projects nationwide. Australia currently operates a voluntary Stewardship scheme operated by Tyre Stewardship Australia (“TSA”). TSA accounts for the management of approximately 25% of the scrap tyres produced and collected and is currently financed by the voluntary contribution of 49% of tyre importers and has almost 1,700 accredited participants, which include tyre retailers, collectors/recyclers, local government, mining, and fleet organizations.
The Government of Australia has stated that the TSA Tyre Product Stewardship Scheme (“Scheme”) has now reached its peak in its ability to recover and reuse end-of-life tyres effectively. The existing Scheme is still far from leveraging the full environmental, social, and economic benefits this recovered resource can deliver. Without timely regulatory intervention, the Scheme cannot shift the needle on these critical indicators or meet community expectations to maximize waste reduction, reuse, and recycling outcomes within Australia. In October of 2022, at the Australian Environment Minister’s meeting, several waste streams were prioritized, including the tyre sector. TSA has reached its limits as a voluntary scheme, paving the way for negotiations to follow Tyrewise in New Zealand with a compulsory Extended Producer Responsibility (“EPR”) scheme.
The Solution:
Klean Industries has been working with local partners to start the planning for a project in Melbourne since 2023 and has completed a Detailed Feasibility Study ("DFS") to design and build a fully integrated tire pyrolysis plant. Thus far, the result has illustrated a significant opportunity. Klean is now in the final phases of contract negotiations with feedstock providers and offtake parties for all the project output products being pre-sold before the Financial Investment Decision ("FID"). The prospects of this project play a significant role in creating a circular economy within the region as it addresses several key issues designated under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (“SDG”) and will create economic opportunities and environmental benefits for the local economy in Melbourne.
Several project sites have been identified, and a project site has been short-listed with planning permission and permitting to commence in mid-2025. The project is centrally located 45 km northwest of Melbourne, Victoria, and has access to a highly skilled workforce. Given the ease of establishing and conducting business in Melbourne, the decision to locate a tyre carbonization facility is compelling and logical, which offers numerous short-term and long-term benefits to the area.
The Melbourne project includes Klean’s commercial scale, environmentally friendly scrap tyre carbonization technology with a planned initial capacity of up to 160-240 metric tonnes per day (“TPD”), which is approximately 16,000-20,000 tyres per day and equates to approximately 60,000-80,0000 metric tonnes per annum (“TPA”). The project is designed to convert the waste tires into highly valuable commercial-grade recovered carbon black (“rCB”) and biogenic recovered fuel oil (“rFO”). Additionally, the facility will also co-production green hydrogen. This plant will be fully integrated with Klean’s proprietary tire char upgrading technologies that enable the transformation of low-value tire char into high-value carbon black replacements, which can replace Virgin Carbon Black ("vCB") by volumes of 10% up to 100% depending on the specific application. Klean pioneered the commercial scale process for converting end-of-life tires into desirable black carbon alternatives and renewable biofuels that deliver significant environmental savings.
Manufacturing new tyres uses tremendous amounts of petroleum and carbon black from non-renewable resources. Compared to manufacturing virgin carbon black, Klean’s CBk KleanCarbon uses +90% less water and emits +90% fewer greenhouse gases than traditional carbon black production and is an environmentally responsible alternative to virgin carbon black derived from end-of-life tires. Klean’s CBk KleanCarbon performs similarly to specific ASTM reference grades of virgin carbon black but has unique physical properties and characteristics that improve environmental and function performance and offer significant cost advantages.
The global effort to reduce CO2 emissions means that manufacturing companies face growing regulatory pressure to decarbonize the supporting raw material supply chains and minimize their carbon footprint. Virgin carbon black is a primary resource for manufacturing tyres, rubber, and plastics. Reducing the environmental impact of virgin carbon black is desperately needed to comply with current emission reduction targets and strategies to enable the transition to a low-carbon circular economy. CBk KleanCarbon has a reduction of approximately 450kg of carbon emission per metric tonne of rCB. In contrast, carbon emissions can exceed 2.5 metric tonnes of carbon emission for every metric tonne of virgin carbon black production.
As this project goes through Front End Engineering and Design ("FEED"), we are evaluating whether this facility will include upgraded fuel oil technologies to convert the recovered pyrolysis oil into upgraded products. Subject to the final FEED, the pyrolysis oil, once condensed, may be split into two streams, of which approximately 90% is a hydrocarbon product of similar quality to VLSFO, 1%, and 10% is a naphtha-like product. Additional attributes include notable reductions in carbon emissions as the resulting rFO contains a biogenic content of approximately 35-40%, resulting from natural rubber found in end-of-life tires. The facility will be ISO 9001 and 14001 certified, and all products will also be ISCC and ISCC+ certified as circular raw materials.
The resulting products from the Melbourne project will then re-enter the virgin raw material supply chain as a locally produced sustainable transportation fuel or marine fuel. The upgraded recovered carbon black, CBk KleanCarbon, will be used to manufacture new tyres, rubber compounds, plastic masterbatch, and blending material with virgin carbon black manufacturing industries. This enables these industries to create product circularity by re-integrating recovered resources into the marketplace, improving environmental performance, and lowering raw material product costs while offsetting emissions associated with their respective industries. The Melbourne facility is estimated to offset carbon emissions of over 100,000 metric tonnes annually.
This project will also include the Klean Loop™, a blockchain software as a service ("Saas") platform to create a fully transparent end-of-life tire recycling and product manufacturing marketplace. The plant will combine all its operation data on the Blockchain. It will feature a fully integrated track and trace program for everything it receives and produces that will cross several supply chains from end-of-life tyre collection to recovered carbon black sales to the carbon emission offsets created by the project.
The Outcome:
The result is the preservation of finite resources through the production of the following sustainable commodities (approximate volume):
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