Sustainable Development Goals
Organizations Involved:
Nippon Steel, Hirohata City, Japanese Automobile Tire Manufacturers Association, Several Tire Recyclers
Services:
Design & Engineering, Due Diligence, Supply Chain Management, Component Supply
The Challange:
As Japan recovered from World War II, the country significantly advanced its manufacturing capacities, and the domestic production of tires rapidly increased in parallel with full-fledged motorization in the 1960s, which resulted in the production of 64 million new tires per year; 22 million scrap tires being created as waste alone. By 1970, the production of new tires had risen sharply to over 124 million yearly, and the number of scrap waste tires had jumped to over 41 million. This created a massive amount of scrap tires, which created an environmental burden in less than a decade, and it needed a solution. This trend continues as waste tire volumes increase from 360,000TPA to over 1,000,000TPA by the year 2000, posing a serious problem related to the preservation of the environment. This problem prompted a social need for waste tire recycling in Japan.
The Solution:
With the diversification of economic activities and consumers' daily lives in recent years, an increase in the amount of waste discharged has become a serious global environmental issue. To preserve the living environment, the Japanese government has also taken necessary measures, for example, revising the Waste Disposal Law so that waste can be controlled and recycled and that appropriate disposal can be promoted.
In this context, the Hirohata Ironworks of the Nippon Steel Corporation has been using cut waste tires amounting to a little over 5,000 metric tonnes per month for its Scrap Melting Process ("SMP") as a substitute for part of the coal and iron scraps since 1999. More concretely, when cut waste tires are charged into the SMP, the steel cords in the scrap tires are melted and recycled into steel, while the carbon in the rubber is utilized as a component of melted pig iron. Furthermore, the waste tires are gasified as a substitute for coal. They are used as a heat source for melting steel, and the hydrogen-rich gas is extracted as an energy source in the ironworks plant.
It is an essential problem for the continual expansion of the Japanese economy that we abandon the type of economy based on large-scale production, consumption, and waste and construct for our economy a circulatory system comprising the theme of 3Rs (namely, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle). Nippon Steel's Hirohata Works plays a part by using less than 5% of the waste tires discarded across Japan.
Humanity's most significant task is to sustain our economy's growth in the 21st century and discover how to emerge from an economy dominated by mass production, consumption, and disposal since the middle of the 20th century. In other words, it is urgently required to "structure a recycling-oriented society." Under these circumstances, Hirohata Works was created, and a system of collecting scrap tires from all over the country was established, thereby responding to the social need to utilize many waste tires effectively. In the future, the promotion and utilization of recycled waste tires will become more evident to other countries outside of Japan in terms of using scrap tires as an excellent resource for the generation of low-cost fuels, which also reduces carbon emissions from a CO2e lifecycle perspective.
The Outcome:
The result is the preservation of finite resources through the production of the following sustainable commodities (approximate volume):
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