Kwik-Fit’s Green Emphasis

Kwik-Fit, Europe’s largest independent fast-fit company, has been at the forefront of ensuring that tyres collected from its centres are reprocessed for many years. As the company’s range of services has extended in recent years to embrace brake replacement and vehicle servicing and MoT work, so Kwik-Fit has worked with waste management companies to dispose of all waste products.

More than five million tyres and almost 40,000 tons of tyre casings are removed from cars and vans annually by Kwik-Fit. Some tyre casings are remoulded and others, along with tyres, are shredded or crumbed. The resulting material is used as: fuel in the cement industry, in landfill engineering projects, as surfaces at sports and equestrian centres and playground, to make carpet underlay and roof tiles and in producing portable rail crossings. The steel cord in casings is extracted and re-used in steel making.

Other material recycled includes:
• Around 1.5 million exhausts removed annually are collected by contractors and sold on the worldwide scrap metal market along with spark plugs, shock absorbers, zinc balance weights and hundreds of thousands of brake pads, brake discs and hydraulic cylinders. Brake callipers are re-used by manufacturers.
• Precious metals such as rhodium, palladium and platinum are extracted from more than 650,000 old catalytic converters removed annually.
• Thousands of batteries are reprocessed with the lead extracted and re-used, battery casings are reprocessed as plastic and acid is treated and disposed of in line with hazardous waste regulations.
• Almost 500,000 litres of waste oil is reprocessed and used as marine oil and as fuel in a number of factories including steelworks.
• Aluminium from oil and fuel filters is compacted and sold to aluminium smelters and the waste oil reprocessed and sold as industrial fluid along with waste brake fluid.
• Thousands of litres of anti-freeze are sent to specialist chemical extraction processors.
• Air filters are disposed of with general waste via local authority wheeled bin collections. Paper and cardboard waste is separated for reprocessing.

Head of Kwik-Fit Fleet Mike Wise said: “We view worn out parts not as rubbish, but as the raw product for something else. Amid ever-growing awareness around company and individual environmental and waste recycling responsibilities it is essential that major organisations, such as Kwik-Fit, lead by example and display their corporate social responsibility credentials.

“The fleet industry – suppliers and their fleet customers – must work together to ensure tyres, exhausts, batteries and other vehicle parts and fluids are not being illegally dumped or stockpiled. Fleets need to be sure that waste is being disposed of in the correct way and, where possible, recycled to create other resources.”