Due to the impact of COVID-19 on the environmental sector, industry professionals have begun to re-evaluate tyre waste as a valuable resource. Our sales director, Gary Moore has recently been featured in the latest issue of Tyre Trade News discussing why end-of-life tyres should no longer be a ‘waste headache’. If you missed the original article, you can catch up below…

With a reported 1.5 billion products reaching their end of life globally, every year – and 60% of these said to be landfilled, stockpiled, illegally dumped or ‘lost’ from the resource chain – tyres continue to represent a notorious problem for the waste management industry.

The complex make-up of tyres and a lack of engineering advancement in this specific area of waste handling, means that for several years they’ve been considered economically unviable to process. Until now…

The impact of COVID-19

COVID-19 contributed to newfound difficulties across the environmental sector, with many valuable recyclables found to be in short supply. Savvy industry professionals therefore began to re-evaluate previously difficult waste streams – including tyres – for their resource potential.

Highly sought-after steel, for instance, remains ‘locked’ within tyres, unless the products are shredded, and the composite materials liberated for segregation. But devise a carefully-designed tyre processing line and it’s possible to:

• extract the metal for resale.
• transform the rubber into a homogenous product for road base, tip cover, landscaping and playground safety surfaces
• utilise any residual material in energy recovery processes including thermal desorption, to produce fuel oils and clean gas for electricity generation, plus a burn-efficient tyre derived fuel (TDF) for the cement industry.

The wealth in ‘waste’

Many forward-thinking tyre handlers are way ahead of this curve and didn’t need Covid-19 to highlight the opportunities associated with tyre recycling. For such firms, all eyes are now on maximising margins.

Processing tyres for recycling and energy recovery requires sophisticated machinery. However, thanks to engineering advancements, ultra-clever technology can in fact be very simple to run. And, acknowledging the long-standing difficulties associated with making money from this once-deemed-unshreddable waste stream, tyre processing systems are now also designed with profitability in mind. In fact, many waste handlers have achieved a payback period as short as 18 months.

Key to maximising the wealth in ‘waste’ tyres, is the design of a processing line that can produce a contaminant-free, homogenous output, in a single pass. This reduces the capital investment required to build the system. If the technology is flexible and can be easily reconfigured to handle different input materials – including standard car/passenger tyres, through to more rugged truck and OTR tyres – the investment is further protected. And if different output specifications ranging from 30-400mm can be satisfied, depending on end user requirements, routes to market should open up too, to minimise risk.

The technology must be engineered to withstand the pressures of this tough, bulky waste stream, and a slow-running machine with high torque should ideally be sought. This will also ensure minimal wear and long service intervals, which protects uptime and keeps maintenance costs low, without jeopardising throughputs. A capacity of up to 15 tonnes per hour should be comfortably achievable, with no de-beading required, and operator safety always ensured.

What’s next?

Some industry professionals will read this and think, converting tyres into an alternative fuel is nothing new. And they’d be right. But the resource potential in tyres is only going to grow, and quickly. In fact, a product that has long proven troublesome for many, is fast emerging as a widely recognised and increasingly important piece of the environmental jigsaw.

Read the full article from Tyre Trade News, here.