Belgium’s Risorce secures €12.5 million for ELT pyrolysis plant

Risorce, a Belgian company active in the transportation and trading of end-of-life tyres, has closed a 12.5 million euro round of financing to fund a new end-of-life tyre recycling plant in Liège Province. This facility will utilise the pyrolysis process and have the capacity to process 2.4 million tyres a year, around half the waste car tyres collected in Belgium.

Several funds and financial sector players participated in the financing round, including Green.er, Noshaq, ING and Wallonie Entreprendre. This first phase financing will facilitate the construction of a unit that Risorce will build as early as 2024, followed by subsequent units, allowing the site to be fully operational by 2025. Risorce has selected the East Belgium Park Development Zone in Baelen as its future location. Plans are for six waste tyre processing units on the site that are together capable of processing 18,000 tonnes of tyre granulates annually.

The pyrolysis process will mainly produce oil, which Risorce will sell as a raw material to European petrochemical companies. The process will also produce carbon black and gas, which Risorce will use in industrial processes or for the plant’s operating needs, and the facility will convert all tyre granulates arising from the process into products with an industrial application. Risorce comments that the pyrolysis plant will be the first of its type operating on an industrial scale in Belgium and neighbouring countries.

“Risorce meets a need for local solutions in Belgium for processing tyre waste, while at the same time being firmly committed to a circular economy approach. We are offering a locally-based solution that is both technologically and environmentally robust. A real innovation,” states Bernard van den Wouwer, founder and chief executive officer of Risorce.

Input from leading players

According to van den Wouwer, leading players are working with Risorce to build the plant, in strict compliance with environmental and legal standards. He considers that the involvement of Green.er, the investment fund set up by Belgian non-profit waste tyre management organisation Recytyre to support the emergence of new tyre processing industries, underlines the technological and strategic interest of this type of project in Belgium. The project has also received the support of a committee of experts from Pôle Mecatech, a local competitiveness cluster, of which Risorce is a member.

“The traditional rubber recycling industry is at a turning point,” comments Chris Lorquet, chief executive officer of Recytyre. “It needs to reinvent itself. The future of material circularity lies in the chemical processing of tyre components. The Risorce pyrolysis project is a fine example of this. I am also very pleased that this initiative is based in Wallonia. The Green.er fund was created to support the development of such industries at a local level.”