ASTM Seeks Input for Recovered Carbon Black Standards

The ASTM International committee on recovered carbon black (rCB) (D36) announced it is developing new standards and are seeking input on the new standards and related efforts. Several subcommittees are supporting these efforts to help the tire recycling industry, committee members said.

A subcommittee (D36.10) recently approved a list of 22 existing standards that are already being used in the carbon black industry. The D36 committee, which formed last year out of a need to address rCB separately from existing groups, says it will now recognize these standards as acceptable for use in the rCB industry until rCB statistical data is available that may suggest otherwise. The complete list can be found at the ASTM website.

“Since recovered carbon black is not the same as carbon black, it is important for our (rCB) industry to start standing on our own feet and acknowledging the difference from normal carbon black,” Pieter ter Haar, vice chairman of the new committee and head of research and development and quality assurance at rCB producer Carbon Clean Tech in Germany, said.

The committee chairman, Anthony Thornton, director of technical information at Micromeritics Instrument Corp., said “While we will be drawing heavily on existing ASTM standards, such as those from CommitteeD24 on Carbon Black, we will be developing others specific to the needs of the many industries producing and using recovered carbon black.”

In addition, the subcommittee on co-products (D36.20) is soliciting laboratories to participate in a round robin study on rubber-derived liquids. In this study, several existing test methods will be used to verify their reliability for those liquids.

Also, thirteen proposed terms from the subcommittee on nomenclature (D36.30) could be approved and published by the committee by late March, according to an ASTM statement.

A task group within the subcommittee on environmental safety and sustainability (D36.40) has been formed to explore areas of standardization for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in tires. The task group will hold its initial meeting in conjunction with the conference of the European Tyre Recycling Association in Brussels, Belgium, on March 14.

Standards are urgently required for rCB to give potential users some confidence in the quality of the material they are buying,” Chris Norris, membership secretary for the D36 committee said.

Committee vice president Ter Haar said a key role for the committee will be to look at the end use and find test methods that will allow better correlations between recovered carbon black and in-application behavior.

Those interested in joining the standards developing activities of the recovered carbon black (rCB) committee should visit ASTM.org.

© Scrap Tire News, March 2018