The Story of PRTI: Building the Future of Tire Recycling Through Industrial Innovation

Some of the most transformative innovations start not with cutting-edge technology, but with overlooked problems hiding in plain sight. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Chris Hare shared PRTI’s journey from discovering an overlooked opportunity to building a scalable solution for one of the world’s most persistent waste challenges.

The story begins with a problem that’s been around since the 1830s. “Vulcanization as a process, which most people are aware of, is how tires stay together,” Chris explains. “Vulcanization was discovered as a chemical process in the late 1830s. And since then, lots of people have tried to unvulcanize tires and really not been able to figure out a strong way to do it consistently or in a way that’s really economically viable.”

This challenge has led to a massive environmental problem that most people rarely think about. “In the US alone, we’re talking about over 300 million tires per year thrown away,” Chris notes. “The reason I think this is a problem most people don’t think about is you only change tires periodically, so you only worry about the cost or the disposal periodically… unlike things like your household trash or plastic bottles that are in front of you every day.”

The company’s origins trace back to 2013, when the founding team, successful in various industries from space programs to oil and gas, began looking for meaningful problems to solve. They discovered a promising technology in Italy, where a team had made initial progress in tire recycling but hadn’t scaled the solution. As Chris explains, “What were able to do was agree a deal to buy the technology, continue having the italian team, some of them as our partners, but really to take the technology and scale it.”

When Chris joined in 2015 as part of what he calls “the reboot founding team,” PRTI began its journey of transformation. The diverse backgrounds of the team proved crucial. “The group of us here now, we have very diverse backgrounds, and it’s interesting, after this amount of time, that we are communicating on very disparate topics with very different backgrounds,” Chris shares. “Running a business is running a business doesn’t matter, really, what shape or size or industry it’s in. There are some common threads.”

The team’s approach to innovation has been methodical and thorough. “We’ve worked very hard for the last seven, eight years to take this technology from an infancy position right to a point where we’ve run it nearly 10,000 times, where we’ve processed 50 million pounds of tires, where we’ve run it for literally over 100,000 operating hours,” Chris notes. This wasn’t just about processing material – it was about proving scalability.

Their journey hasn’t been without challenges. One significant hurdle came when they realized their initial automation efforts weren’t sufficient. “We had automated the process and it still wasn’t performing the way we wanted it to, which meant that we hadn’t automated it the right way yet,” Chris explains. Instead of pushing forward with a flawed solution, they took the time to rebuild and refine their approach.

The company’s growth has attracted attention from major institutional partners. “The traction that we’ve seen, particularly over the last 18 months, is from more institutional partners… larger scale banks, larger scale investors as well as larger scale partners, large companies, as well as large financiers,” Chris shares.

Looking ahead, PRTI has ambitious plans for expansion. “I would like our technology and our company to have much broader reach in the next five years,” Chris explains. “I would see us having multiple sites in multiple locations and starting to become recognized as a company that’s really doing good and making money.” This vision isn’t just about business success – it’s about scaling impact. As Chris notes, “The more money you make, the more good you can do, right? Philanthropy starts with having a net worth in the first place.”

Their story demonstrates that sometimes the biggest opportunities aren’t in creating new markets, but in solving persistent problems that others have overlooked or deemed too difficult. For PRTI, success isn’t just about building a profitable business – it’s about proving that environmental challenges can be transformed into scalable business opportunities through methodical innovation and persistent execution.