The Sustainable
Rubber Handbook

Climate change is reshaping every industry — and rubber is no exception. Tires, seals, hoses, conveyor belts, medical gloves: elastomers are embedded in virtually every supply chain on earth. Yet the vast majority end up incinerated or landfilled. The window to change that is narrowing.

Regulatory pressure is accelerating. The EU's Ecodesign Regulation, Extended Producer Responsibility mandates, carbon border adjustments, and incoming recycled-content quotas are forcing procurement, R&D, and strategy teams to act — often before clear answers exist. At the same time, the number of proposed solutions is growing fast: devulcanization routes, bio-based elastomers, chemical recycling, dynamic covalent networks, recovered carbon black, and more. Each comes with its own body of literature, its own maturity level, and its own set of trade-offs. What actually works at scale? What's still years away from industrial application? Keeping track is genuinely difficult.

The Sustainable Rubber Handbook exists to solve that problem. As a PhD researcher in sustainable elastomers, I want to make the science accessible — translating findings from across research, policy, and industry into clear, honest overviews, so that anyone who cares about the topic can stay informed and contribute to making rubber more sustainable.

No prior expertise needed — just curiosity.