Toward Fully Recycled Rubber Composites Based on a Combination of Devulcanization and Particle Reblending

Tire waste management is a significant and unsolved issue that continues to threaten human and environmental health. Here, a single component rubber adhesive is optimized to produce rubber composites containing 40 wt % recycled rubber crumb in a virgin polybutadiene matrix. The best-performing 40 wt % samples outperform previously published samples which only contain 15 wt % recycled content. To push the recycled content as close to 100% as possible, the single component adhesive was combined with devulcanization to produce a sample containing 40 wt % recycled rubber crumb and up to 55 wt % devulcanized material, yielding a total of 95 wt % recycled content. Even with this high recycled content, the performance is comparable to the previous reports at 15 wt % recycled crumb.