A Chilean startup figured out how to turn scrap tire carbon into battery-grade graphite.

The challenge in tire recycling has rarely been extracting carbon. It’s been making that carbon useful enough to matter. Pyrolysis can pull carbon black out of end-of-life tires, but contamination, inconsistent morphology, and variable electrochemical performance have kept it stuck in low-value applications.

Sustrend Laboratories is attempting to change that.

Instead of conventional graphitization above 2000°C, they use a catalytic route at 800–1500°C. The carbon is purified, chemically activated, then seeded with transition metal salts like Ni, Fe, and Co. These salts enable structural reordering at far lower temperatures.

After catalyst removal, the output is nano-metric, spherical, highly crystalline graphite particles of 20–70 nm, with specific capacity rising from ~15–20 mAh/g to ~400 mAh/g at ~95% efficiency.

This is a simplified read of the process. Each stage has its own complexity and trade-offs.

It’s basically tire waste being reclassified as battery feedstock. 🙂

If the consistency holds at scale, tire waste could become a relevant upstream input for battery and advanced materials supply chains, not just a recycling output.

If you’re tracking where battery materials and energy storage are heading, this is one of the more interesting circular material plays to watch.