Descripción
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More than 250 million of post-consumer tyres are accumulated each year just in the European Union. New accumulations are added each day to the billions that are stockpiled or buried both in designated landfills and illegal dumping sites. Used tyres accumulation means a wide range of environmental problems: lixiviation to the ground of toxic compounds used in the formulation of tyres or the release of these substances to the atmosphere with the uncontrolled burning of the tyres. Also, accumulations of tyres mean a shelter for rodents, mosquitoes and other plagues. The chemical structure of vulcanized rubber accounts for its extraordinary thermomechanical properties; at the same makes their degradation, recycling and reclamation extremely difficult. Different approaches have been taken for the recycling of used tyre rubber, and chemical, ultrasonic, microwave, mechanical, and termomechanical methods have been developed. Devulcanization of the material without further degradation of the organic polymeric chains is the most desirable objective, being devulcanized rubber a very valuable material that can be revulcanized. In the biodegradative methods, the microorganism uses its own metabolism for the recycling of the vulcanized rubber. This is an environmentally friendly process, and means a completely new situation, not only for the industry but for the entire society. Our work has a main objective: the use of the microbial metabolism ability for the tyre rubber degradation. This technological challenge is related to our second objective, the environmental improvement to achieve compared to other techniques. As an initial step of the project the toxicity of ground tyre rubber against a set of common reference strains of cosmopolitan nature was evaluated. These studies are necessary to establish pretreatments for the commercial rubber prior to its treatment. Apart from the selection of potential degradative microorganisms from different collections, a general isolation from apparently degradated tyre rubber in a tyre dumping site has been made. A collection of bacteria and fungi has been obtained for the assay of their supposed degradative activities. For the assays, different fermentation formats and conditions have been tested and evaluated until final work conditions have been established. After the treatments, different types of analysis, both microbiological and non-microbiological, have been made, both on the material and on the supernatant. | |
Internacional
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Si |
Nombre congreso
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COST Action D33 Working Group 3 Meeting: Nanoscale Electrochemical and Bio-processes at Solid-Aqueous Interfaces of Industrial Materials |
Tipo de participación
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960 |
Lugar del congreso
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Madrid, Spain |
Revisores
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No |
ISBN o ISSN
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DOI
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Fecha inicio congreso
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02/10/2008 |
Fecha fin congreso
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04/10/2008 |
Desde la página
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0 |
Hasta la página
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0 |
Título de las actas
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Abstracts CD |