A New Day for Tyre Recycling in Kazakhstan

A new facility owned by the Kazakhstan Rubber Recycling company has become the Central Asian country’s first end of life tyre recycling plant to enter operation. The facility, located in the capital city of Astana, is equipped with machinery built by Germany’s MeWa Recycling Maschinen und Anlagenbau and holds a capacity of around 11,000 car and truck tyres per annum.

Kazakhstan Rubber Recycling intends to produce a clean rubber granulate and an active fine powder (ActiMeWa) for use in road construction. The active fine powder can be added to the bitumen and thus substantially increase the quality and lifetime of asphalt in the face of Kazakhstan’s greatly contrasting summer and winter temperatures. Not only are differences in temperature compensated for, however. The active powder can also considerably reduce road surface noise levels and offer substantially more grip for vehicles, even in the rain.

Complete tyres up to 1.5 metres in diameter will initially be fed into a MeWa UC 150 rotary shear. The machine breaks the tyres up into approximately palm-sized shreds, with throughputs of up to seven tonnes per hour possible. A granulation line then gradually breaks these shreds down into a granular size of around eight millimetres. After each work step, different separation techniques then separate the textiles, stones and steel cord that the tyres contain.

Granulators that are integrated into a final cleaning process grind the granulate down further into grain sizes of between 0 to 4 millimetres. MeWa has optimised this process step in the last few years and reports that it can offer granulates here in hitherto unmatched purities. Some 99.95 per cent (by weight) of the secondary raw material is free of steel and textile lint at the end of the processing chain. This granulate is used for the production of floors for use in sports facilities and children’s playgrounds, rubber mats for housing and agriculture, and for moulded part products for road and garden.

The first section of the plant was transported by rail to Kazakhstan in the autumn of 2008. This was followed in the spring of 2009 by the granulate cleaning unit. In order to guarantee smooth and efficient delivery and construction in Kazakhstan, the complete plant was built in a one of MeWa’s warehouses in Germany and then disassembled and put into standard freight containers for onward delivery. The modules were then reassembled on site piece by piece.