Post-consumer tires as a valuable resource: review of different types of material recovery

ABSTRACT Nowadays sustainability is a key topic and waste should be considered a resource. For this reason, a large body of literature is being developed on the management of the large quantity of post-consumer tires with sustainable approaches. The ongoing research activity on tires is focused on providing eco-sustainable solutions aimed, on one hand, at reducing the amount of waste and, on the other hand, at optimizing and improving the technologies and methodologies to obtain ‘green’ products to be recycled on large scale. This review examines the solutions for the reuse of waste from post-consumer tires proposed in the literature during the last five years (2015–2019) with a focus on advantages, drawbacks and future research developments of each end-of-life tires (ELTs) recovery technology. The final aim is to provide a comparison of different fields of application for the recovery of post- consumer tires, particularly for those researchers who want to start an activity in this field. The results show that the most investigated field of application is the civil engineering area. However, it could be environmentally and socially useful to further investigate solutions suitable for recovery in sanitary applications such as water purification. Porous carbon, obtained from ELTs by pyrolysis and subsequent activation, can be successfully used as adsorbent to remove contaminants that could be harmful to the environment and human health. The latter application seems to be particularly advisable in less economically developed areas as it would represent a possible solution to the problem of environmental reclamation of water resources. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT