Bolder, Liberty Tire collaboration sets stage for more circular industry

SAN ANTONIO—It's been a few years.

And for Tony Wibbeler, founder and CEO of Bolder Industries, so much has changed.

"My first Smithers Traction conference was before carbon black in 2016," Wibbeler said. "I walked into the room, and I was really bright-eyed with this great idea. I had just acquired a bankrupt plant and I was ready to go with my own technological approach (to tire circularity) and no one wanted to talk to me at all.

"I left early."

Seven years—and tens of millions of dollars in investments in his plants and his technology—later, Wibbeler returned to the Smithers Traction Summit, this time as a speaker. Because the industry not only wants to hear what he has to say, it needs to hear it.

With Bolder Industries, Wibbeler has built a company around innovation. The kind of innovation that takes the waste we can't afford to generate and turns it into materials the tire industry can't afford to live without.

Yes, Bolder takes the old and turns it into something new—or at least something it used to be.

For the tire industry, specifically, that means breaking down scrap tires into oils (BolderOils) and recovered carbon blacks (BolderBlacks)—materials that can go right back into tires.

And while the processes and sciences behind Bolder's products are complex, measured and precise, the concept, he said, is simple: He allows tires to be tires again.

And that is critical.

"It really goes back to the core of the issue," Wibbeler said. "And at the core of this is 70 percent of the tire is manufactured originally with petroleum-derived (products). … The way I look at it with our business is that we are giving that petroleum a second life. And if it goes back into a tire, it gets another one and another one."

Before launching Boulder, Colo.-based Bolder Industries in 2011, Wibbeler built a career in the medical field. More specifically, he designed disposable devices for the women's health care industry.

"I was fortunate enough to take 17 products from my ideas on cocktail napkins into the women's health care arena," Wibbeler said. "… Long story short is: We were really focused on disposable equipment—reducing patient-to-patient contact, reducing infection rates—and there is this unintended consequence of all this work we were doing in the women's health care space, and that was a tremendous amount of medical waste."

When Wibbeler sold his medical-focused business in 2006, he turned his attention to more sustainable innovations and solutions. It was that journey that brought him all the way around to tires.

"I started my journey in medical waste and wound up in tires—largely because, at the end of the day, I saw a couple of things," Wibbeler said. "I saw a pseudo-homogeneous feedstock, I saw a market in the carbon black industry that was really being challenged, and, at the same time, I saw renewable fuels."

Bolder, Rubber News previously reported, employs a unique process that takes scrap tires feedstock and uses 98 percent of the material. From one tire, Bolder can produce gas (10 percent); BolderOil (40 percent); BolderBlack (33 percent); and steel (15 percent).

In all, about 75 percent of the solids and liquids extracted from the recycled tires make their way back into new tires as well as other rubber and plastics products.

Once he had his plan in place, Wibbeler went all-in with the purchase of that bankrupt plant.

From there, Bolder just went and grew.

"I am happy to say that, today, we effectively take tires from every stage of their process—everything from somebody else's off-spec carbon black or messed up version of recovered carbon black to chips to single-pass shreds to whole tires," Wibbeler said. "And we manufacture multiple oil products."

Today that first plant not only is up and running, it's expanded.

Bolder operates in Marysville, Mo., where it has two reactors that run 24 hours a day. Additionally, in 2021, Bolder brought into the fold a 66,000-sq.-ft. production facility in Terre Haute, Ind.

Bolder also operates product development facilities in Punta Gorda, Fla., known as the Bledsoe Innovation Group, and Maryville, which is separate from the production space there.

But the key to all of that growth, Wibbeler said, is quality. Consistently.

No exceptions.

Ever.

"There is a certain way I create a recipe to make that happen. And it took a couple of years to dial that in," Wibbeler said. "That was not the easiest thing to get a consistency that somebody like Pirelli would actually pay attention to us."

There's good reason for that. Namely, if he doesn't do his job, tire makers—or other rubber product makers—using his recycled oils and blacks can't do theirs.

"If I am going to supply Michelin with a product, it better be exactly the same every day," Wibbeler said. "It can be whatever it is to start—they are really good at compounding, so trust me, they can get a lot of different things in their tire to make it work. But boy, if you say, 'I am going to send you this,' it better be identical every day.

And part of that starts with feedstock."

So Wibbeler set out to source some of the best possible feedstock.

That's when he found Liberty Tire.

Thomas Womble's business philosophy isn't complicated: Simply, he intends to keep his promises.

When Liberty Tire says it is going to be there to pick up waste tires, it will be there, said Womble, CEO of Liberty.

And you can bet that Liberty will be on time. Every time.

"Liberty was built around the model of balance," Womble said. "We wake up and there are about 1 million tires each day. We have to pick them up, we have to process them, and we have to find a home for them."

So for more than two decades Liberty Tire has been keeping its promises. Because the best businesses thrive on customer service, Womble said.

Liberty, he said, set out to be one of them.

"The industry has changed," Womble said. "When this (tire recycling) industry started, it was 'come get the tire when you can and we will pile them outside. Just don't do anything illegal with it and we're happy.'

"Now, it expects world-class service. It expects sustainability conversations. It expects communication and collaboration and partnership with the goal of saying that we want to have end-of-life tires going into sustainable products by 2030."

True sustainable products—circular products—start with the end of another product's life.

"The end-of-life tire has got to get collected," Womble said. "We have got to collect the tire. … Then, once you collect the tire, you have got multiple outlets to balance the throughput, the pull through to find the home for that material."

When it comes to partnership, collaboration and the sustainable conversion part of the industry expectations, well, Liberty is committed to that, too. And that is where Wibbeler's "really bright-eyed," big ideas come in.

It's also why Liberty has committed to supplying Bolder with all of the feedstock it can.

Because it wasn't just that Wibbeler and Bolder were determined to make a difference on the tire circularity side. It was that Bolder was doing it. Consistently.

And if it had the right feedstocks in the right amounts it could do even more.

"We have seen a lot of good ideas, and we have seen a lot of good intentions that didn't work out," Womble said. "For us to change our profile and to adjust an outbound flow and commit volume, we have to have some level of confidence you are going to take in some span of what you say you are going to take."

Turns out, Bolder was all of that.

The company was a missing connecting piece in a tire circularity puzzle that Liberty fits comfortably into. Wibbeler and Bolder provided the perfect outlets for those millions of tires that Liberty collects day in and day out.

Creating a more sustainable—more circular—tire industry is essential, Womble and Wibbeler said. No one person or company can do that alone. Every player has a distinct role, and that makes collaboration imperative.

In fact, it was Wibbeler's willingness to collaborate that stood out to Wombler.

Bolder was one of the few new players in the tire circularity game that also wasn't looking to take any of Liberty's market share.

"That's (not) the goal. I'm not trying to pick up tires," Wibbeler said. "Like, I don't have any business going into a bunch of trucks and riding around like that. That sounds miserable. I have this really cool invention that I'm going to bring. And he (Wombler) was like, 'well you go about your invention and I'll bring you some tires.'

"This not a competitive environment," Wibbeler said. "We can all work together to bring more sustainable materials through business."

Bolder, like Liberty, is one of those businesses, he said.

It is circularity and sustainability rolled into science and technology.

"Sustainability is one thing, but circularity is a whole other animal," Wibbeler said. "And with Liberty, at our side and us working together we can bring true circularity into the tire industry and beyond."