With less than two months until Carbon Black World 2026, we caught up with keynote speaker Calvin Xu, General Manager at RC Era (Shanghai) Material, to discuss the future of low-carbon emission solutions in carbon black production.
Q1: Your talk at Carbon Black World 2026 will dive into “Sustainable carbon circulate enables net zero of tire industry”. A) Why do you think it’s important for others in the industry to hear this message? B) What are some of the key take-aways?
A) By sharing this message, we would like to share our view to shape low carbon emission solutions by looking at various aspects of tire pyrolysis supply chain. Some of the solutions may needs quite intensive R&D activities, while some of them may just need to be addressed by managing the value chain and supply chain.
B) Key take-aways are technical development and supply chain management are equally important in developing solutions of low carbon emission.
Q2: What are the main challenges that the industry is facing and how do you think that this conference can address them?
The main challenges the industry is facing might be: There are various ways to achieve sustainable carbon black, for example, for tire applications. However, there is always a matter of by using how much extra effort the performance is achieved. More extra effort means higher cost, or even means more additional carbon footprint added to so-called sustainable materials.
Q3: What do you think will be some of the most interesting advancements in materials or processing in the near future?
People are all talking about AI. Anything related to AI promoted material development of processing would be very interesting.
Q4: What are you most looking forward to hearing and/or seeing at Carbon Black World 2026?
We are eager to see solutions or ideas that jump out of the box of traditional carbon black manufacturing. Something like cross-discipline ideas or applications would be also expected.
