Rubber reborn: McMaster startup converts tire waste into sustainable solutions
Rubber reborn: McMaster startup converts tire waste into sustainable solutions
Publish Date: 2026-05-17 11:00:00
Source Domain: www.technology.org
Mike Brook’s Neopara Materials combines a novel ingredient with tire rubber to create new materials – like hockey pucks.
McMaster researcher Mike Brook inside his lab with a fragment of a rubber tire. His startup, Neopara Materials, is repurposing tire rubber using a special reinforcing filler ingredient, diverting waste from landfills and lowering carbon emissions. Image credit: McMaster University
A McMaster startup is turning old rubber tires into new materials used in construction, reducing waste and carbon emissions along the way.
Neopara Materials has created a reinforcing filler ingredient made with ground-up tires that can be converted into silicone, polyurethane and epoxy resin products like sealants, coatings and adhesives.
“Our whole business is upvaluing rubber crumb, which is a widely available form of waste, and coating it with ingredients that enable the material to be remade into something new,” says Neopara chief scientific officer Mike Brook, a professor emeritus of Chemistry whose four decades of silicon chemistry research at McMaster has formed the basis for this green initiative.
In 2020, the McMaster researchers discovered a novel way to break down and dissolve the rubber used in tires that would extract the petroleum-based polymers from which the tires are made and enable them to be repurposed.
The first real test of this technology has been facilitated through a partnership with Hyundai Canada by transforming old tires into brand new, sustainable hockey pucks, with rubber crumb provided at no cost by the Brantford-based company CRM of Canada.
Once they coat the surface of that rubber crumb with their “patent pending” ingredient, the crumb is able to maintain its structure while replacing silicone, polyurethane or epoxy in a variety of applications.
“What Neopara’s solution does is it turns the rubber crumb into a material that doesn’t know it’s not a…
