Turning end-of-life tires back into the materials they came from - carbon black, rubber and silica - with a patented process that un-cures rubber instead of shredding it.
Roughly a billion tires reach the end of the road every year. Most are burned for fuel or shredded into crumb that never becomes a tire again. Arduro, a recovered-materials company headquartered in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, was built on a contrarian premise: the valuable materials inside a used tire are still valuable, if you can get them out without wrecking them.
The obstacle is chemistry. Rubber is made durable through vulcanization - sulfur cross-links that lock the polymer into a tough, permanent network. That permanence is exactly why rubber resists recycling. Grind it, heat it, or burn it, and you destroy the very structure that made it useful.
Arduro's answer is a process called selective devulcanization. Instead of breaking everything down, it targets the sulfur cross-links and snips them, while leaving the carbon-carbon polymer backbone intact. The result is not a downgraded filler but recovered raw material that Arduro says can stand in for virgin grades.
From a single end-of-life tire or stream of industrial rubber waste, the process pulls three products: recovered carbon black, recovered rubber, and recovered silica. Most recyclers chase one output and discard the rest. Recovering all three is central to how Arduro argues the economics of recycling can change.
The company operates at the intersection of chemical manufacturing, advanced materials and the circular economy - a B2B supplier selling into tires, automotive parts, industrial rubber goods, plastics, inks and coatings. Its pitch to those buyers is unusually blunt for a sustainability story: comparable performance, lower carbon footprint, and potentially lower cost.
"When you're in the lab, you are really creating something out of nothing." - Patrick Kroeger, VP of Technology & co-inventor
Figures as reported by Arduro and its lifecycle-assessment data. Independent verification varies by application; treat as company-stated approximations.
The technology traces to an accident. In 2012, University of Louisville researchers noticed rubber seals in water utilities degrading unusually fast after the EPA mandated a treatment chemical called chloramine. Most saw a maintenance headache. Arduro's founders saw a controlled way to break rubber's sulfur bonds - and turned the failure mode into a recycling method.
End-of-life tires and industrial rubber waste enter as the raw feed.
A chloramine-based agent targets the sulfur cross-links that vulcanization created.
The carbon-carbon polymer chain stays intact - the part worth keeping.
Carbon black, rubber and silica separate out as usable raw materials.
"There's no other technology out there that does that right now." - Patrick Kroeger, on modifying vulcanized rubber
Recovered carbon black (rCB) built as a drop-in alternative to virgin carbon black. Low ash content, small particle size, PAH-compliant and 6PPD-free - for tires, automotive parts, industrial rubber goods, inks, coatings and plastics.
Recovered rubber that Arduro states is molecularly identical to oil-produced rubber, aiming at virgin-grade performance and reliability for tire manufacturing. Samples expected as trials complete.
A reinforcing filler aimed at green tire treads for electric vehicles - high tear strength, high modulus, fatigue resistance, low rolling resistance and superior wet traction.
A closed-loop model: manufacturers send in their own rubber waste and receive recovered raw materials to reintegrate into new products - directly targeting the Scope 3 emissions that dominate their footprint.
Arduro makes money two ways. It sells recovered raw materials - carbon black, and eventually rubber and silica - to manufacturers, and it runs Circularity as a Service, processing a customer's own rubber waste back into feedstock under contract. The second model is notable because it keeps the material inside the customer's loop, which is precisely what makes it credible against Scope 3 emissions accounting.
The customers are industrial: tire makers, automotive and industrial rubber producers, and companies in plastics, inks and coatings. As an early-commercial-stage supplier, Arduro is still largely in the sampling-and-trials phase, proving material performance before volume adoption.
The competitive field splits two ways. On one side sit other tire and rubber recyclers - pyrolysis-based recovered carbon black producers like Bolder Industries, Pyrum Innovations and Scandinavian Enviro Systems. On the other sit the incumbents Arduro ultimately wants to displace: virgin carbon black giants such as Cabot, Birla Carbon and Orion.
Arduro's differentiator is the devulcanization approach itself. Where pyrolysis burns rubber down and reconstructs carbon black, Arduro's low-temperature chemical process aims to preserve material structure - and to pull three products from the same feed rather than one. Whether that translates into durable cost and quality advantages at scale is the question the trials are meant to answer.
University of Louisville researchers find chloramine degrading rubber seals in water utilities; grad student Patrick Kroeger explores repurposing the mechanism for tire recycling in his master's thesis.
The devulcanization method is submitted for patent protection in the fall.
The full patent for the chloramine devulcanization process is issued.
Investor Ian Lowe licenses the technology through the university's transfer office and forms Arduro Sustainable Rubber to commercialize it.
Arduro commercializes its recovered carbon black and debuts Circularity as a Service at the ACS International Elastomer Conference in Pittsburgh.
Recovered rubber and silica move through lab and scale-up trials as Arduro plans to proliferate its technology through 2027.
Ian Lowe is Arduro's CEO - a business executive and investor who was drawn to the technology through the University of Louisville's technology transfer office and took it toward commercialization. Patrick Kroeger, whose 2012 master's thesis first framed the recycling application, serves as VP of Technology and designed the system.
Dr. Gerold Willing, professor and chair of chemical engineering at Louisville, initiated the underlying research alongside civil-engineering colleague Thomas Rockaway. A cluster of chemical-engineering alumni rounded out the early team - the kind of academic-spinout origin that shapes Arduro's engineering-first, evidence-driven culture.
Tracing chloramine damage in Louisville water utilities to Arduro's devulcanization technology.
The ash content, particle size, PAH compliance and 6PPD-free claims behind the flagship product.
How the closed-loop model reframes waste rubber as a customer's own feedstock.
Mapping Arduro against pyrolysis players and other recovered carbon black producers.
The slow, unglamorous path from a 2012 thesis to commercial product.
The regulatory and environmental context making 6PPD-free fillers commercially relevant.
How Arduro's recovered silica targets low-rolling-resistance treads for electric vehicles.
A profile of Arduro's CEO and the commercialization decisions he faced.
Why recovering carbon black, rubber and silica together changes recycling unit economics.
A closer look at the carbon-footprint claims and what the LCA does and doesn't cover.
Note: Arduro is a private early-stage company. Watch for demo and conference videos on its LinkedIn and via rubber-industry outlets such as Rubber World and Scrap Tire News - a searchable path to interviews and product demonstrations.