Quality Control for Recovered Carbon Black

A newly approved standard from ASTM International’s recovered carbon black committee (D36) provides a test that will help to differentiate products and provide a quality control tool for producers and users. Recovered carbon black (rCB) is a recycled product made from end-of-life tires.

The new standard (soon to be published as D8474) describes a thermogravimetric (TGA) technique to determine the amounts of organic residue, overall fixed carbon content, and ash content in recovered carbon black.

“The new standard will be a useful tool specifically for quality control and can be used for off-take agreements, technical data sheets, and certificates of analysis,” says ASTM member Pieter ter Haar, from Circtec. “This will be most useful for manufacturers, as well as users and consumers.”

“This standard will improve the adoption of rCB,” says ter Haar. “Recovered carbon black can complement or substitute conventional carbon black in many applications, including the production of new, more sustainable tires.”

“We are always looking for technical input and testing capabilities for the development of new standards,” says ter Haar. “We’re also looking for labs with TGA capability to help develop bias and precision studies for new standards.”