Michelin to Guarantee Annual Supply of Tyres to Recycler

Michelin has recently agreed to guarantee the supply of at least 6,000 tonnes of end of life and reject truck tyres each year to Newark based recycling company Charles Lawrence International, who will convert the waste tyres into rubber surfacing material for sporting and children’s playground usage. About 200 tonnes of material will be shipped each week from Michelin in Dundee and Ballymena to the Nottinghamshire recycler.

The agreement is all the more significant as presently the UK has no legislation requiring tyre manufacturers to take responsibility for end of life products; Michelin’s actions in this area to date, in this country at least, have been purely voluntary. “Michelin has a global strategy for minimising the effect we have on the environment, and although there is no legal need to do it, we see recycling our end of life tyres as a moral obligation,” said Michelin UK managing director Jim Rickard. “Charles Lawrence is a world leader in the sector and we are very pleased to have secured an agreement to put what is effectively our waste to good use.”

According to the managing director of Charles Lawrence International, Roger Hicks, the agreement to take a minimum of 6,000 tonnes of Michelin tyres each year comes after “extensive trialling and a lot of discussion” between the tyremaker and the recycler. “We needed to be sure we could take a consistent amount of tyres each week so that we had a secure supply of materials and so Michelin could find other uses for the old tyres we can’t use, which I know they have done. The figure is a minimum standard and we would realistically expect to be taking at least 10,000 tonnes per year.”

Charles Lawrence International is one of the UK’s largest recyclers of scrap tyres. Company literature reports a current capacity of between 17,500 and 20,000 tonnes per annum – approximately 350,000 individual casings. One of the company’s key products is the Playtop playground surfacing, pioneered in the UK 30 years ago and today one of Europe’s leading wet pour play surfaces.