In 1998, the North East of England sowed the seed of sustainable innovation in the mind of a Norwegian university student. Twenty-seven years later, Wastefront co-founder, Christian Hvamstad, has returned to Sunderland with a business recycling tyres for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
When European students look to study abroad, they often make a beeline for universities in warm coastal cities. In contrast, Tyne and Wear in the North East of England is often overcast, cold and windy, and not usually at the top of anyone’s list, despite its golden, sandy beaches. Yet Norwegian student, Christian Hvamstad, picked to study in Sunderland, for its university’s business administration degree, and has returned almost three decades later to build a factory there that offers the world a solution to travelling more sustainably.
“I had never even heard of Sunderland in 1998. The weather is what it is, but I had a great time,” reminisces Hvamstad, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Wastefront. “This experience was also my first exposure to innovation because we helped local companies with their business plans.”
Hvamstad and his fellow international students had to untangle the infamous Mackem accent in English. “I was initially taken aback by the accent, but I quickly grew to appreciate the warmth of the people and strong sense of community,” says Hvamstad.
Little did he imagine he would return to that same community, after two decades, to build a 118-million-euro tyre recycling plant that is creating over 100 skilled jobs.
Wastefront’s plant will be at the port on the River Wear, where new offices and homes are being developed. Its headquarters is in the newly remodelled landmark River Wear Commissioners Building, once home to those who helped Sunderland become one of the world’s greatest shipbuilding towns. “It was sad that the city declined when it lost a lot of industry, but the area is now having a rebirth, and we will be part of that journey and part of solving a global problem,” says Hvamstad.
Hvamstad and his business partners, Vianney Vales, Inge Berge, Vegard Bringsjord, Henrik Selstam and Jon Gausen, have two solutions for the planet: a more sustainable way of recycling tyres, and using them to produce affordable sustainable aviation fuel, an alternative to fossil fuels and a product that is in short supply according to airlines that want to meet stringent new green targets.
The genesis of the business idea was hatched from the joint experience of Hvamstad and co-founder Berge, a fellow Norwegian with a professional background as co-founder of Quantafuel, a Norwegian plastics recycler.
Both men became fascinated by the potential of pyrolysis, the process of burning in an oxygen-free furnace, but wanted to look for an alternative to burning plastics, since different types produce inconsistent results.
The search for a more homogenous feedstock led them to tyres, which contained valuable commodities that could be reused, like steel and natural biogenic rubber. “Tyres are the little brother to plastics that are not discussed enough. There are few solutions to recycling them,” says Hvamstad.
Globally, the disposal of tyres has long posed a serious environmental challenge. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development estimated in 2008 that more than four billion end-of-life tyres were stockpiled or in landfills around the world, a number that continues to grow. Today, around 2.5 billion new tyres are produced annually, yet sustainable end-of-life solutions remain limited. In the United Kingdom alone, over 400,000 tonnes of tyres were exported in 2023, often ending up in jurisdictions with weak environmental safeguards.
Past attempts to recycle tyres, such as turning them into materials for sports pitches or playgrounds, have offered only partial solutions. These uses cannot keep pace with the scale of tyre waste, and some have raised concerns about chemical leaching.
Pyrolysis offers an alternative: a circular approach that recovers valuable resources, like oil and carbon black from tyres, reducing reliance on virgin fossil materials. Wastefront’s Sunderland facility is at the forefront of bringing this technology to commercial scale, ensuring compliance with strict United Kingdom and international environmental standards.
“Too often, tyres are either dumped or incinerated in poor conditions abroad,” says Hvamstad, citing a recent British Broadcast Centre (BBC) investigation into exports of waste tyres from the United Kingdom to India. “Our method is precise, energy-efficient and designed to meet the highest benchmarks on emissions and traceability.”
Pyrolysis is being used to recycle tyres already, but the process has acquired a poor reputation; millions of tyres being shipped from the United Kingdom to India were being burnt in makeshift furnaces, causing serious health problems and negative environmental impact to communities there.
Wastefront’s team says the pyrolysis used in unlicensed factories in some countries cannot be compared to the process they have developed with top engineers to meet rigorous British and global standards for emissions control. “It is like comparing a car of today with one from 1945,” says Hvamstad. Rather than operating at very high temperatures, which consumes a lot of energy, the Wastefront process is designed to consume less “while still achieving high yields”, he stresses.
The first stage of the Wastefront process involves separating the steel from the tyres using electromagnetic separation at the end-of-life tyre aggregator.. The remaining rubber and carbon black undergo pyrolysis in a controlled, oxygen-free environment.
Wastefront refined its original pyrolysis so it can produce sustainable aviation fuel in a collaboration with Swedish company, Hulteberg, which specialises in developing catalysts for industrial processes. The researchers wanted to stabilise the tyre derived oil Wastefront was producing to reduce its levels of sulphur, one of the worst air pollutants and present in tyres because it vulcanises and strengthens rubber.
Funded by a 500,000 euro grant from the Research Council of Norway through Eureka’s Eurostars programme, Wastefront, with Hulteberg, developed a method of pyrolysing the tyres using a catalysation process that breaks the sulphur bonds with cobalt, nickel and molybdenum sulphides. Called the HYFUEL method, after the name of the project, it uses less energy than competitor processes.
Wastefront is now awaiting approval from the international standards association (ASTM) to use this high-quality pyrolysis oil for sustainable aviation fuel.
Crucially, the method means the oil contains less sulphur, one of the key criteria for fuel to be sustainably burnt. “The excess gases produced during the pyrolysis are used to power the process itself, making it self-sustaining and energy-efficient,” adds Hvamstad.
The team’s innovation has attracted investors and customers already, with purchasing commitments from Dutch energy trader, Vitol, and the German rubber and latex company, Weber & Schaer, is an recovered carbon black offtaker. Investors are convinced by the company’s two-pronged business plan, following circular economy principles in producing sustainable chemicals, like recovered carbon black, to be used in tyres, and the prospect of being a game-changing provider of sustainable aviation fuel.
One of the most significant of Wastefront’s deals is with International Airlines Group, which owns British Airways, Iberia, Vueling and Aer Lingus. In January, the group announced an undisclosed investment in the Norwegian company.
Since major energy companies like Shell have halted planned sustainable aviation fuel plants, airlines have complained of lack of supply and that the existing provision from other sources than tyres is expensive.
In addition, Wastefront will be selling into a market where, from this year, planes taking off from the European Union and the United Kingdom will have to increase their use of sustainable aviation fuel from about 0.2% to 2%. In five years, this grows to 6% in the European Union and 10% in the United Kingdom. By 2050, the European Union target becomes more ambitious, rising to 70%.
International Airlines Group alone is targeting using one million tonnes of sustainable aviation fuel per year by 2030, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of taking one million cars off the road annually.
“Our process is highly scalable and cost-effective, which makes it ideal to help bridge the supply chain gap,” says Hvamstad. Wastefront says the cost of its sustainable aviation fuel will be below 1,000 dollars per tonne, compared to 1,485 produced using hydrotreated esters and fatty acids and the even more expensive alcohol-to-jet pathway.
Production at the factory in Sunderland is scheduled to begin next year, processing up to 10 million waste tyres annually. Due to the scale of the investment required, Wastefront plans to build in Sunderland in phases, initially being able to produce 8,000 tonnes of oil a year, and then eventually quadrupling that capacity. It will also begin by processing tyre-derived oil into sustainable aviation fuel in third-party refineries, working its way to only producing it in the Sunderland plant when it receives ASTM approval.
To meet demand, Wastefront says it will eventually open further factories in Northern Europe, the United States and the Middle East, twinning locations to ports and the supply of tyres. For now, the founders are pleased with the pace of the building work at the port in Sunderland. For Hvamstad, it will always remind him of returning home to campus.
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Eureka programme and project name: Eurostars-2 HYFUEL
Countries involved: Norway, Sweden
Project duration: 2021-2023
