The consortium ECO-RUBBER has released at the Instituto de Biomecánica de Valencia (Spain) the first results of the project regarding the process of industrialization. The first prototype of the eco-bollard has been presented during this meeting, whose simulations are assessing the adequate bollard performance.

The ECO-RUBBER consortium is set up by two companies: RECIPNEU and BERLÁ, and by two Technologic Institutes: IBV and AIMPLAS.

The main objective of the ECO-RUBBER project is to optimize the actual rubber recycled process to obtain high-quality urban furniture fabricated by means of a new sintered process. Recycled rubber products developed will be an ecologic and sustainable alternative to the products made of virgin rubber, wood or concrete. The improved recycled process will allow adapting the recycled rubber characteristics to the properties of the products: the selected product in the project to show the advantages of urban furniture made of recycled rubber is a bollard.

The bollard was selected like success case to demonstrate the advantages of an urban innovation made of recycled rubber because material elasticity would reduce the risk of an injury as a result of hits or accidents. Furthermore, the project will promote the use of recycled rubber as an environmentally friendly material allowing that a residue, whose destination was the landfill or incineration, could be used again as raw material for the production of urban innovations.

Nowadays, most of the used tyres are placed on dumps at the end of their lifetime, it represents one of the main environmental problems of the world. According to SIGNUS in Spain were picked up in 2010 more than 195.000 tones of tyres, but only the 51% was recycled. In 2007, the 27 countries of the European Union accumulated 3.4 million tons, according to the European Association of Tyres and Rubber Manufacturers (ETRMA). Only the 38% of the used tyres were recycled, principally to produce low-quality products, while the 32% was used as combustible, changing the environmental problem to other one in emissions way.

The project is funded by the European Commission through the EACI (Executive Agency for Competitiveness and Innovation) included on the CIP Eco-innovation program. The ECO-RUBBER project comes up from the CRIOSINTER FP6 CRAFT project , where the viability to achieve enough functional properties using material with 95% of recycled rubber content reducing both the cost and also reducing the environmental impact in more than 70% compared with natural rubber was demonstrated. The objective was achieved by means of analyzing the crumb recycled rubber obtained in different grinding processes, to select the best recycled rubber fractions (particle shape, size and size distribution) and adapting press moulding to sintering manufacturing process using standard machinery and suitable revulcanization additives.

Likewise, IBV is the leader of the task which aim is to obtain an eco-label for the developed product in order to identify the ecological benefits contributed by recycled rubber products, provide the needed information and ensure its visibility. Another aim of this task is to promote the use of an adequate communication strategy that enables the acceptation of recycled materials on high consumer markets. These actions will make possible the elimination of the emotional barriers to the use of urban furniture made of recycled rubber.

The ECO-RUBBER project has duration of 30 months, it is within the framework of the subprogram Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program (EIP) – Eco-Innovation and has a budget of more than 1.000.000 Euros.