From Tyres to Playgrounds With Charles Lawrence

Towards the end of last year Michelin signed a deal with Newark based recycling firm Charles Lawrence International, guaranteeing that, each year, a minimum of 6,000 tonnes of its truck tyres will be used to make children’s play and sports surfaces. Each week some 200 tonnes of material are to be shipped from Michelin in Dundee and Ballymena to the Nottinghamshire recycler.

The deal is a mutually beneficial one, as Charles Lawrence International managing director Roger Hicks explains: “The formal agreement to take 6,000 tonnes of Michelin tyres per year comes after extensive trialling and a lot of discussion. 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.”

As some of the materials are coming from Michelin’s Ballymena factory in Ireland, that facility has thus become the first of its kind to have all its production waste completely recycled. The tyres are cut up using custom built machinery, have the reinforcing steel and bead wire removed (which is passed to the scrap trade for recycling) and then chopped again into granules which are used as the base of Charles Lawrence’s patented ‘Playtop’ play area surfaces – a product pioneered in the UK 30 years ago and today one of Europe’s leading wet pour play surfaces.

The agreement is all the more significant, comments the recycler, 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.”

Michelin has, as a company, actively sought to reduce the impact of its global activities in recent years, and the Charles Lawrence scheme is but one of many undertakings around the world. The latest edition of the company’s Performance Responsibility Charter, released in 2007, lays out the Michelin approach to corporate and social accountability and how employees are expected to help. Michelin sees its role in the recycling of used tyres in the UK as a leading one, as UK managing director Jim Rickard explains: “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. Charles Lawrence is a world leader in the sector and we are very pleased to have secured a deal to put what is effectively our waste to good use. Through our Sapphire operation we dispose of hundreds of thousands of car tyres every year, and now a substantial amount of truck tyres will also be taken care of.”

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.