Jan Boomsma –
I have been designing with rubber for many years, mainly sealing systems. With the current concern for the environment, the question of the circularity of rubber has been raised. Of course, circularity is nothing new, it is just that in the last decades we forgot about it and started to dump everything. Dumping also became the standard for rubber parts, especially tires are notorious with their landfills. Rubber recycling has not only been researched, but applied on an industrial scale for many decades.
Due to a lack of incentives, the use of raw materials remained the standard and recycling never became mainstream. It is much cheaper to produce rubber from virgin materials with more consistent quality than to use recycling techniques.
But now the incentives are getting stronger: end-customer demands, new legislation, the awareness of the younger generation that only wants to work for sustainable companies, and so on. So even though circularity is nothing new in the rubber industry, this is a great moment to launch the Circular Rubber Platform. A place to share knowledge and connect everyone from solution providers to end users. To make circularity as normal as it used to be, so that we can enjoy all the good properties of rubber forever.
