Every time we describe what we’re building at Gilead Dynamics, the same question comes up: Why pyrolysis?
It’s a fair question, to be sure. In tire recycling, pyrolysis has a reputation. Investors have been burned, and plants have been shut down. There are even vocal “pyrolysis deniers” out there.
We knew this playing field well when we started exploring a tire recycling solution. But we chose to move forward intentionally because we believed the technology wasn’t broken. The commercial model around it was.
The Wrong Diagnosis
The question in tire recycling isn’t whether pyrolysis works. Germany has long used tire pyrolysis to produce oil at industrial levels. The chemistry has been proven and was never the problem. The real problem was commercialization.
Conventional plants require permanent facilities, lengthy construction timelines, and significant upfront capital before any tire processing can begin. And the output quality is often inconsistent even after launch.
Technical failure and business failure are not the same thing. Pyrolysis has struggled because the commercial architecture around it has been broken. Those are different problems – and each requires a different solution.
What We Did Differently – And Why We Believed We Could
I’ve been here before. At Lubrication Specialties Inc. (LSI), we built Hot Shot’s Secret from the ground up. It was a performance lubricant line that most of the market didn’t think needed to exist, in a category that was already crowded. But we grew it into a globally recognized brand. What I learned from that experience is simple: a great product that can’t scale isn’t a business. You have to solve both problems at once.
That’s exactly how I looked at pyrolysis. The chemistry wasn’t broken – the business model was. So we started there.
We didn’t try to fix the existing approach; instead, we replaced it. The Gilead Reactor – the core of our Carbon Black Extractor (CBX) – uses microwave energy instead of conventional furnaces. Its proprietary three-chamber, nitrogen-sealed system gives us something the industry has never had: consistent, predictable output. That matters more than it might sound. If you can’t reliably tell a customer what grade of recycled carbon black (rCB) or tire pyrolysis oil (TPO) you’ll deliver, you don’t have a viable product.
But output quality is only half the problem. The other half is getting the system deployed in the first place. The CBX is mobile and self-contained, which means it’s up and running in months, not years and requires no permanent facility or multi-year capital commitment.
Together, those two things – predictable output and fast deployment – are what we believe will finally make pyrolysis work as a business.
Proof We Mean It
In 2026, we partnered with ATS Industrial Automation, a global leader in advanced automation systems, to begin deploying the CBX at scale. It’s a phased rollout designed to validate the model before we expand it. We’d rather let the results speak than get ahead of them.
We knew pyrolysis had a complicated history. But we also knew – after seven years of work and an honest accounting of what had failed before – that the reputation was earned by the wrong design, not by a flawed process.
That distinction is what Gilead Dynamics was built on. And it’s what we’re proving out, one deployment at a time.