自動車タイヤに用いられたゴムの，超臨界二酸化炭素を反応媒体とするマテリアルリサイクル技術

抄録

The amount of waste tires is increasing every year, and their reuse as recycled materials is an important issue from the perspective of environmental problems and resource conservation. This article summarizes the technology for recycling waste tires using supercritical carbon dioxide (ScCO₂ ) as the reaction medium. This technology allows diphenyl disulfide, the cleavage reagent, to efficiently penetrate into the network of rubber molecules and selectively cleave the cross-linking points formed by sulfur. The recycled materials, which were blend of waste truck tire rubber and virgin rubber, exhibited relatively good properties, although not as good as the completely virgin material. This technology was developed for natural rubber, and then applied to other synthetic rubbers. This technique was further developed as a method to crush tires by injecting a jet of ScCO₂ and then cleaving the cross-link points.