Professor Costas Tzoganakis and Sam Visaisouk
Professor Costas Tzoganakis is a winner of the 2022 En-Hui Yang Engineering Research Innovation Award. The award is bestowed by the Faculty to outstanding faculty members each year.
“I am honoured and humbled to win this prestigious award as I know that there are many worthy candidates making impressive contributions to the body of innovative research work carried out at the University of Waterloo,” said Tzoganakis, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering. “This award represents an acknowledgment of the importance of my group’s work in developing an economically feasible solution to the environmental issue of end-of-life rubber tires.”
Creating a circular economy
Professor Tzoganakis’ research has significantly advanced sustainability within the global tire industry. He developed a unique chemical-free process for rubber devulcanization which can break down end-of-life tires turning them into Tire Derived Polymer (TDP), a value-added rubber compound.
This groundbreaking research creates a useful path for waste tires, which might otherwise be burned for their energy value. Instead, through this process, they may be used in the form of recycled rubber material to manufacture new tires.
Tzoganakis serves as the Chief Technology Officer of Tyromer Inc., a University of Waterloo start-up company that is using this patented technology on rubber devulcanization.
The company itself sprang up out of University of Waterloo’s entrepreneurial ecosystem in 2009 with assistance from Sam Visaisouk, who was then serving as Entrepreneur in Residence, at the University of Waterloo’s Technology Transfer Office (WatCo). WatCo assumed intellectual property management of the technology and helped raise money for prototype development.
Advancing Sustainability
Tyromer Inc. has been the recipient of numerous awards for sustainability, with many in the tire industry embracing this leading-edge recycling process.
Currently, Tyromer Inc. operates three joint ventures, two locations in Canada and one in Europe. Demand for Tyromer TDP has been growing rapidly in Europe and the Tyromer Europe plant is almost at full production capacity.
Tyromer Inc. has recently signed two new licensees, with KALTire in Ontario and Tyromer India in Chennai. KALTire is Canada’s largest tire retreader and has been using Tyromer TDP in its rubber formulations since 2016.
Tyromer Inc. has just announced that its recycled rubber material, produced via its environmentally sustainable, non-chemical extruder devulcanization of end-of-life tire rubber, is now used by Continental Tires.
“Tyromer is a trusted partner of ours supplying recycled rubber material. At Continental, we have focused for many years on technologies that generate high-quality feedstock derived from end-of-life tires to produce new tires. Our goal is to gradually use 100 percent sustainably produced materials in our tire products by 2050 at the latest,” says Dr. Andreas Topp, Vice President, Material & Process Development and Industrialization at Continental Tires.
The En-Hui Yang Engineering Research Innovation Award acknowledges that Tzoganakis’ eco-friendly rubber devulcanization technology as applied through Tyromer Inc. contributes towards the development of a circular economy within the tire industry, fully aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goals.