Delta-Energy, LLC
Columbus, United States

Delta-Energy, LLC, a premier resource recovery company, provides alternative, higher value solutions for tire recycling, including:

Recovery of basic raw materials and fuels.

Reduction of carbon footprint for already heavily carbon dependent companies in the polymer industry.

A means of meeting customer demands for recycled material content.
The Delta-Energy Discovery
Delta-Energy has discovered what has eluded so many others until now - how to recover a carbon black based pigment from tires that has reinforcement and tint strength properties comparable to virgin carbon black. With its low temperature DEPolymerization™ process, Delta-Energy provides higher value products than can be produced by traditional pyrolysis systems.

Delta-Energy began with a unique premise: a belief that a solution could be found for preserving the properties of recovered carbon black from rubber. The company started in 2001 as a subsidiary of RJ Lee Group, a premier materials science company of 250 people specializing in solving tough scientific issues and developing technologies. Richard Lee, CEO of RJ Lee Group, believed the technical challenge of this initiative provided an opportunity for the rubber industry if successfully solved. Through the guidance of RJ Lee Group’s science advisors and materials analysts, Delta-Energy discovered the combination of operating parameters that best preserves the properties of carbon black recovered from rubber. This makes Delta-Energy unique in the petroleum-based resource recovery field.

Also setting us apart from other companies is our commitment to market the products we produce. This means we have an understanding of the markets for our products. We design, produce and own the plants we make to ensure we are the premier global supplier of recovered carbon black based products. We understand the level of our success depends on making products that meet market performance requirements.

In 2006, the timing was right to spin Delta-Energy from RJ Lee Group as a privately held, independent company. Its Directors are industry people with diverse experience in manufacturing, business ownership and investment banking. The executive managers come from chemical and polymer manufacturing, marketing and sales, plant construction, business ownership, and investment banking fields. They all share the same Delta-Energy values:

Caring about and responding to market needs for higher value, innovative solutions that address their technical product and environmental needs.
Pride at being this industry’s leader.
Maintaining leadership well into the future.

The Problem

Why is recycling rubber so important? From an economic perspective, huge amounts of petroleum resources are used to manufacture rubber compound. Waste tires, as well as scrap tire piles present fire hazards and insect breading grounds that society wants eliminated. It would be irresponsible of industry not to recover higher value raw materials from tires for reuse in rubber if the technology existed.In North America, we use tires at the rate of one tire per person each year. Imagine the challenge of finding a way to reuse 300 million scrap tires in an environmentally friendly way so none are sent to landfills. While plastics, paper and metal can be melted or dissolved for reuse, rubber can not. For decades finding a recycling method that would recover rubber components in a reusable form has presented enormous challenges to industry.

Responding Successfully

Growing public awareness that natural resource availability and landfill space are limited commodities has increased the demand for more recycled content in the goods we buy. The responsibility to meet this demand falls on product manufacturers and their suppliers. Together we must continue to develop and create higher value ways to recycle materials that are technically and economically feasible.

For its part, Delta-Energy has developed the patented DEPolymerization process that allows us to produce premier recovered solid, liquid and gas products.

D-E Black® – Two Unique Product Lines

D-E Black products provide compounders with recycled materials offering comparable performance and lower cost compared to the virgin carbon black products they supplement. The two D-E Black product lines, Phoenix Black® and Zephyr Black®, meet the needs of the two major applications for carbon black – reinforcement in rubber and pigmentation of plastics and coatings.

Phoenix Black

Phoenix Black supplements the use of virgin carbon black as a versatile, lower cost, reinforcing agent in rubber. In thermal black applications requiring low reinforcement, use of Phoenix Black also reduces risk of mold tear, potentially increasing yields and reducing waste.

Zephyr Black

Zephyr Black provides an alternative black pigment for plastic and coating applications for which highly structured carbon blacks are currently used.
Both Phoenix Black and Zephyr Black lines offer consistent product quality. You can order them in either pellet or powder form. Standard packaging for these products are inclusion bags or semi-bulk reusable bags.

D-E Oil — Cost Efficient, Recovered Oil

D-E Oil is a high fuel value, organic liquid product similar in viscosity and fuel value to #2 fuel oil. Companies using high sulfur #6 fuel oil can reduce sulfur emissions by supplementing their fuel needs with D-E Oil. Also, adding D-E Oil to #6 fuel oil will lower fuel viscosity, reducing the risk of fuel line pluggages in cold climates.

Living Our Philosophy

Our products’ performance characteristics are not the only way you benefit from using them. We continuously look for better ways to use the materials we buy and the products we make for even greater resource recovery value and savings for you. For example, we apply our philosophy of waste minimization by selecting packaging materials that can be reused or even incorporated into end users’ products. These choices minimize your package disposal requirements’ associated costs.

And Delta-Energy product lines are backed by our outstanding customer service and responsive technical assistance. Through our testing lab partners we have the capability to attend to most any technical product issue that we cannot address in house.