Rubber tire life cycle assessment and the effect of reducing carbon footprint by replacing carbon black with graphene

This research utilizes real operating data from a tire plant operating in Central Taiwan to investigate the carbon footprint emissions (CO2e) involved in producing the electric bicycle. The simulation results are based on the PAS 2050 standard using the SimaPro 7.3 software tool. Our results show the total carbon footprint emissions of 1.2-kg tire for the electric bicycle weighing 4.53-kg CO2e, composed of 2.63-kg CO2e from raw tire materials stage, 1.295-kg CO2e from tire manufacturing stage, and 0.605-kg CO2e from tire transport stage. An international certified organization, British Standard Institute (BSI), verified the accuracy of our results as 98.7%. We found that carbon emissions at the raw materials stage were higher than that for the other two stages – manufacturing and transportation. Carbon black was determined as the maximum source of carbon emissions at the raw material stage. To reduce the tire plant carbon emissions, this paper recommends using graphene to replace carbon black. Graphene has been reported by many researches to improve the properties of rubber products. From our simulation results, the carbon footprint emissions of 4.56-kg CO2e of the origin tire plant uses 0.456-kg carbon black to produce 1.2-kg electric bicycle tires. This can be reduced to 4.29 (5.92%), 4.03 (11.62%), 3.75 (11.76%), and 3.49-kg CO2e (23.46%) by using graphene to replace carbon black 25, 50, 75, and 100 wt% respectively. If we focus only on 0.456-kg carbon black producing 1.08-kg CO2e, the reduced carbon footprint will be 0.812 (24.81%), 0.547 (49.35%), 0.28 (74.07%), and 0.0128-kg CO2e (98.81%) by using graphene to replace carbon black 25, 50, 75, and 100 wt% respectively. From our analysis, graphene replacing carbon black can reduce carbon footprint. This has not been published previously and provides a direction for the tire plant to save carbon emissions.