U.S-based circular solutions operation Bolder Industries is to scale its operations into two new manufacturing facilities with the support of Rockwell Automation.
In a hurry? Here are the key notes to know:
- Expansion of operations: Bolder Industries will open two new manufacturing facilities in Terre Haute, Indiana, and Antwerp, Belgium, supported by Rockwell Automation.
- Sustainable product: The company’s flagship BolderBlack is made entirely from recycled tires and rubber scrap, serving as a low-carbon alternative to petroleum-derived carbon black.
- Advanced manufacturing: Facilities use Rockwell Automation’s PlantPAx, FactoryTalk, and other systems to monitor and optimize production for precision and consistency.
- Circular economy focus: The process recovers 98% of tire material, reduces water use and greenhouse gas emissions by 90%, and enables deployment in thousands of consumer products worldwide.
The company currently works on converting end-of-life tires into high-value materials for the rubber, plastics, and petrochemical industries. It is opening new facilities at Terre Haute, Indiana, and on a greenfield site in Antwerp, Belgium.
Founder and CEO Tony Wibbeler explained the company’s flagship product, BolderBlack, comes 100% from post-consumer or post-industrial tires and rubber scrap. It is a sustainable carbon black alternative that replaces petroleum-derived carbon black as a rubber reinforcing agent and a black pigment in plastics.
“It looks, feels, tastes like carbon black, but it’s not – it’s its own material,” he said. “We have successfully deployed it back into over 3,000 consumer products everywhere, from performance tires on high-performance vehicles today to wet suits, phone cases, black piping, the list goes on and on.”
Focusing on Waste
Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, Bolder Industries currently has one manufacturing facility in Maryville, Missouri. Mr. Wibbeler founded the company in 2011 originally as a waste-to-energy, waste-to-value, technology agnostic project developer:
“I used to work in healthcare, where there is this unintended consequence of new medical waste, and not everyone in the world is as equipped as more modernized places to handle that. So that was the transition – I started focusing on what to do with waste. I started researching the waste business and felt it was fragmented. It lacked technology.”
A Circular Material
The production of BolderBlack began in Maryville in 2019. There, the process uses 90% less water and emits 90% fewer greenhouse gases than traditional carbon black. Some 98% of each tire’s material content can be recovered via the process. This therefore overcomes key technical barriers, enabling consistent quality.
“Our utilization of BolderBlack is widespread and we bring, in some cases, a circular material – tires are a great use case, and then there is the Patagonia-Bolder program. The products we make are largely driven by the customers we have, customers like Pirelli or Patagonia.”
The facility at Maryville went from proof-of-concept to pilot and then full-scale commercial operation.
“That is what we are stamping now out – that’s where Rockwell has now come in.”
A Greenfield Project
Bolder’s project in Terre Haute is currently under construction. It is expected to be commissioned in late spring or early summer 2026.
“Then we have our prized possession, our gold standard, which is our first greenfield project, in the final permitting stage, in the NextGen District in the port of Antwerp.”
Initially, Antwerp will process around six million tires, all from the Benelux region. Rockwell Automation’s PlantPAx distributed control system will be installed in Terra Haute and Antwerp. The Terra Haute facility currently has FactoryTalk Historian and PowerFlex drives in place, as well as Rockwell’s Fiiix CMMS software.
In Antwerp, the offering will also include Flexline 3500 motor control centers, ThinManager, and FactoryTalk DataMosaix as well as additional power control solutions, network design support from Rockwell’s services team and industrial data centers.
“Antwerp was literally a blank piece of ground to build a factory up with all the modern utility we have today,” said Mr. Wibbeler. “We happen to be living in this AI age, where the reality is the next five years are going to be equivalent to the last 25 years of the internet evolution. So the next five years are laying the groundwork and the framework for our maximum utility of AI, not just in our business operations, not just in our product production side, but also in our product development side, and that’s where Rockwell comes in.
They will handle Rockwell product lines all the way to DataMosaix. So the function of the plant will be monitored every millisecond.
“Decisions we made, not just by humans, but by intel, and ultimately, why that’s important to us is the precision of our product. We can’t be wrong if we’re wrong. This is a highly specced product. It doesn’t seem like it would be, but when you put products into tires, it can’t be wrong.”
Indeed, it needs to be right.
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