Roads to the future

Abstract The chapters of this book have been written by experts in several fields with some having decades of experience in the industry and/or academia. This chapter focuses on several markets that we believe have a major potential from the standpoint of environmental sustainability and profitability for producers. Until recently, tire recycling markets were initiated and expanded without a common focus. In many cases, the recycling companies produced the final product without having an end market in mind and in some cases some companies produced many products that did not appear to be related (from sports field to molded goods, etc.). In this chapter this issue is addressed by discussing today’s seven principal and several niche markets that confirms the potential problems. Around the world, for various reasons, production and use have maintained a relatively uneven pace for different industries (e.g., sports field surface, automobile, etc.). In this chapter several sectors of the recycling industry are briefly discussed including roads, roofing, thermoplastic elastomers, and devulcanization.