The Potential of Pyrolytic Biomass as a Sustainable Biofiller for Styrene-Butadiene Rubber

This chapter explains the significant potential of the pyrolytic biomass char for use as a sustainable carbon black replacement filler for rubber materials. The manufacture of rubber filler is not only energy-consuming, contributing significantly to global CO2 emissions, but uses nonrenewable feedstock in production making it unsustainable. Ongoing work focused upon the development of carbonaceous rubber fillers based on coconut shell, a sustainable and renewable source, is presented in this chapter. A comparison between coconut char and commercial carbon black N772 demonstrates the profound potential of the pyrolytic coconut char to be used as filler. The char filler obtained was mixed with SBR and the resulting rubber product was evaluated for their technological performance, exhibiting high surface area and good tensile strength.