Syntoil After the EIC Accelerator: Tyre Carbon Black Seeks Buyers

Carbon black, the fine soot that makes tyres last, is mostly made by burning crude oil, and global demand is around 15 million tonnes a year, according to a CORDIS article on the project examined here. When old tyres are broken down by pyrolysis, heating without oxygen, a carbon-rich char comes back out, but it carries ash and other pollutants, and it has mostly been burned for energy or used as a construction filler, CORDIS notes. Syntoil, a Wrocław company founded in 2015, says it can wash that residue clean enough to go back into rubber, paint and plastics.

In the EIC Accelerator pilot's Green Deal cut-off of 19 May 2020, the European Commission selected Syntoil for a grant-only award, listing it under the name "SYNTOIL" with its project CBreCYCLE in the official list of selected companies; no partner company is named for the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,498,562.50 towards a total cost of €3,569,375, with the project running from 1 September 2020 to 31 July 2023. Three years later the company is still registered, still filing audited accounts and still listed among Europe's operating tyre pyrolysis plants. What it has not done is name a customer.

Where Syntoil Stands in 2026

Syntoil is an active company. Its full entry in the Polish National Court Register (KRS), current to 7 July 2026, shows annual accounts filed for every year from 2015/16 to 2025, the 2025 statement with an auditor's report, and no insolvency, liquidation or dissolution entry. krs-pobierz.pl lists the same active status, a share capital of PLN 3,808,000 and Piotr Wiesław Jaszek as the sole management board member. North Data records a word and figurative "SYNTOIL" trademark in December 2024.

Outside the register, the signs of activity are thinner. A May 2026 presentation by the consultancy Weibold to the Tire Recycling Conference, citing its February 2026 database, lists Syntoil among the operating tyre pyrolysis plants in Europe alongside Reoil and EuroEcofuel. The company's own website, in a copy archived on 31 August 2026, still carries news items that end in 2023. Its LinkedIn page shows no public posts to visitors who are not logged in.

The Technology: Washing the Soot

Carbon black is the reinforcing filler that gives tyres their strength and wear resistance, and it is also the black pigment in inks, plastics and coatings. Virgin carbon black is produced mainly by burning crude oil. Recovered carbon black (rCB) comes out of tyre pyrolysis as a contaminated char, and its lower quality has kept it out of uses such as paints and pigments, according to the CORDIS Results in Brief; the PARP awards catalogue of 2020 says such char "used to be burned in cement factories because nobody knew how to clean the product".

Syntoil works on both steps. Its first patent family, filed in October 2015 as EP 3156473, covers a reactor for continuous pyrolysis of rubber, which the company told the European Rubber Journal in 2019 runs on rubber granules rather than whole tyres, with steel removed before the reactor. Its second covers the cleaning: in the method published as EP 3781631, the char is treated with a bicarbonate, then hot deionised water and a strong mineral acid, filtered, treated with a strong base, washed and dried. The United States granted the purification patent as US 12,006,215 on 11 June 2024.

The CORDIS Results in Brief, published in December 2023, says the pyrolysis is heated entirely by electricity rather than by burning gas, and that the purified char reaches the level of virgin carbon black. Syntoil's selling point is purity: enough, it says, for paints and pigments, a market that lower-grade rCB has struggled to enter. The company has also described a water-dilutable black pigment for colouring concrete and mortar, according to Spider's Web, and a "We Did It in Poland" campaign entry lists a plasticising and colouring additive for concrete based on its carbon black. No independent test of its purity has been published.

The climate case rests on the company's own numbers, and they have moved. In the 2020 Polish Product of the Future catalogue, which gave Syntoil a distinction, the company put virgin carbon black at up to 6 tonnes of CO2 per tonne and its own at less than a tonne; the International Rubber Study Group repeated those figures in July 2021. In the 2023 CORDIS article, the comparison became 1.5 to 2.5 tonnes for virgin carbon black against less than 0.5 tonnes for Syntoil's. Both versions favour Syntoil, but the baseline fell by more than half, and no life-cycle assessment has been published to settle either.

What CBreCYCLE Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The CORDIS objective set three aims: an industrial-scale demonstrator to prove that the process scales, recovered carbon black sold "at a price level lower than the market price" of oil-based carbon black, and "personalized" grades for high-value uses, as the foundation for commercialisation in an rCB market the company put at nearly €450 million in 2023. When the grant was announced, the company's news page said the project would "last for two years more"; CORDIS gives an end date of 31 July 2023, 35 months after the start.

The final periodic report, covering September 2021 to July 2023, says the existing facilities were expanded into an industrial-scale pilot plant designed to process "2,000 tonnes of pure material per year", combining a continuous pyrolysis line for rubber granules with a soot-cleaning line, powered by energy from the pyrolysis itself, and that "our pilot plant is now operational". On customers it says only that rCB samples "have garnered attention from industry leaders in the pigment and rubber market". The report names no buyer, gives no sales volume and gives no price. Where the plant stands is not stated in any source found.

1. Industrial-scale demonstratorDelivered2,000-tonne pilot plant reported operational in the CORDIS report; Weibold lists Syntoil as operating in February 2026.
2. Personalised rCB grades for pigments and paintsPartlyConcrete pigment and additive described by the company; no published specification or third-party test.
3. rCB cheaper than oil-based carbon blackUnverifiedNo price or cost figure published.
4. Commercial sales after the projectNot achievedNo customer, contract or sales volume announced by Syntoil or a third party since July 2023.

The plant is the strongest result: the EIC paid for a scale-up and the company reports one, confirmed in outline by an industry database three years later. The commercial half of the plan is where the record goes quiet. In 2020 and 2021 the company said it had signed sales and cooperation agreements with carbon black distributors and rubber goods makers, according to the PARP catalogue and the IRSG. None of those partners has been named.

The Money and the Owners

Syntoil's early funding came from prizes and its founders. In 2019 it was a finalist of the Chivas Venture competition and received $250,000 (€222,000), according to the European Rubber Journal. In December 2021 it came second in the first Budimex Startup Challenge, which Budimex announced on 17 December 2021 and for which Spider's Web reported a PLN 30,000 prize. In 2018, before any EU money, co-founder Bogdan Sztaba told money.pl that one installation would process 6,000 tonnes of tyres a year, cost about €3.3 million and pay for itself in three years, and that the company had been turned down for a national PARP grant.

The KRS extract shows the share capital rising from PLN 102,000 at registration, when the company had a single shareholder whose name the public extract masks, to PLN 3,012,000 in December 2019, then to PLN 3,583,000 in November 2022 and PLN 3,808,000 in June 2024, in PLN 1,000 shares. The extract does not show the price paid for the new shares, so the cash raised cannot be derived from it. No venture round, investor or EIC Fund stake has been announced: Syntoil does not appear on any of the 16 pages of the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which matches the grant-only award.

The management has changed once. Martyna Sztaba, named as a co-founder by the European Rubber Journal, was president of the management board from December 2019, with Piotr Jaszek as her deputy; in July 2021 Jaszek took over as president, according to North Data. Sztaba remained the named project coordinator in the 2023 CORDIS article. CORDIS lists no other EU project for the company.

Why Europe Should Care

End-of-life tyres are a large, steady waste stream: around 1 billion are discarded worldwide each year and only about half are recycled, the CORDIS article says, while each tonne of virgin carbon black comes from crude oil. Recovering it fits the Circular Economy Action Plan the Commission adopted on 11 March 2020 as a building block of the European Green Deal, which noted that only 12% of secondary materials and resources were being brought back into the economy. CBreCYCLE was funded in the Green Deal call that followed two months later.

The market around Syntoil is now moving. Weibold's 2026 presentation describes Europe as "rapidly developing to become an ELT pyrolysis hub", with capacity going from about 200,000 tonnes a year today towards about 1 million tonnes in the near future, and maps plants operating, under construction or planned across the continent. That is an opportunity for a company with a cleaning process to sell, and a risk for one whose product has no named buyer while larger plants come online.

The Verdict

Syntoil has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.