News and feature articles relating to recycling, including collection, of end of life tyres.
What Israeli media is referring to as the country’s largest tyre recycling facility opened on February 16 in the northern Samaria Shachak industrial zone. The Tyrek recycling plant, according to reports, is capable of recycling 30,000 tons of tyres per annum, a quantity equivalent to 80 per cent of the end of life tyres replaced with new tyres each year in Israel.
The February 2010 edition of Tyres & Accessories is now available to subscribers (just click more to view the virtual edition). This issue features the Tyre Recovery Business, reports on the recent Autosport/Aftermarket Show, and preview's the forthcoming Tyrexpo Africa trade fair.
Tire Review reports that the Tire Industry Association is offering members the opportunity to save on utility costs by partnering with APPI to find ways to bring down energy costs. APPI will analyse, negotiate, contract, and manage the critical components of utility services including electricity and natural gas, water, recycling, waste removal, freight, check processing, credit card processing and telecommunications, TIA said.
Magnum D'Or Resources reports that truck tyres utilising its SRI Custom Compound have successfully passed the 2,500 kilometre validation trials they were undergoing at the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia. The tyres were fitted to a rear axle of a light commercial vehicle alongside Bridgestone BS100 tyres in size 7.00 –16 12PR in order to test performance and wear resistance.
EW Swiers and Grainger, the York-based tyre recycler has invested £62,845 in recycling equipment including a pre-shredder. The company made the investment last October after it was awarded £25,000 of funding from Resource Efficiency Yorkshire (REY), which is now known as CO2 Sense Yorkshire and European Regional Development fund (ERDF).
R4 Ltd recently launched its first advertising campaign focusing on its environmental services to local businesses and organisations in the Northern Ireland area. According to the company, the campaign debuted on local radio station, with the focus being on how R4’s services make it easier for companies to recycle their vehicle tyres and catalytic converters. R4’s first foray into radio advertising, was produced by a team at the Brownlow Youth Project radio station Xtreme FM.
County Louth, Ireland-based Crumb Rubber has highlighted what one report called the “inadequate state of recycling of tyres in Ireland.” Irish Trucker News quoted Leo Kerley of Crumb Rubber as saying a massive 29,000 tonnes of tyres are not being recycled in the republic annually. Kerley pointed out that approximately 6,000 tonnes of tyres are recycled on a yearly basis in Ireland. The inability of policing waste laws has reportedly left thousand of tonnes of tyre being stockpiled throughout the country.
Recycling machinery maker Eldan Recycling A/S delivered and installed its first complete tyre recycling plant back in 1991. Almost 20 years later, company representatives told Tyres & Accessories that Eldan has developed and optimised its process to “obtain the best possible purity of the rubber granulate.” This means granulate that is 99.9 per cent free of liberated steel and textile. According to the company, this purity is obtained through specially built equipment such as classifiers and aspirators that operate by means of the “air flow” principle. Another reason for the positive results is said to be the company’s emphasis on modular design.
Tyre tripling, inserting two used tyres inside another one, has been increasingly adopted as a method of saving space and achieving transportation cost savings. To give a real life example, up to around 1,600 tyres can normally be fitted into a standard container. Up to 3,500 “tripled” tyres can be fit in the same space. According to Arne Blaes, the proprietor of a company which manufactures tripling machinery, the process was invented by Africans who in most cases carried out the strenuous tripling process by hand.
Recycling technology company RockTron beat internationally renowned entrants to win Rushlight’s fossil fuels award on 28 January. The award was reportedly presented in recognition of the company’ s “spectacular leap forward in Fly Ash Recycling.” This technology, says RockTron, has the potential to help cut man-made CO2 emissions by up to 2 per cent whilst reducing the need for fossil fuel usage. The Award recognises technological advancement or innovation that has made a significant contribution to the reduction in environmental impact of fossil fuel usage.
After experiencing more than a year of general economic recession, the UK tyre recovery sector enters 2010 functioning at roughly full capacity, with around 500,000 tonnes of tyres being collected last year. This puts tonnages on a par with the latest complete data compiled by the Used Tyre Working Group in 2008. However, while the UK has managed to limp out of recession with tyre recovery tonnages generally intact, there are signs that the same market pressures that have put the squeeze on new tyre profit margins are putting pressures on the collection part of the tyre life cycle too; and that regulation-dodging is still a problem.
So, while its good that tonnages in 2009 were relatively stable, the bad news is that illegal tyre collection and disposal activities are rife. What’s worse is that they complexity of such schemes has developed to the point that the disruption caused by rogue “white van man” collectors is now at the bottom end of a wide spectrum. This means large scale scam disposal rings and – in some cases – even franchise operations that are in operation taking money from tyre dealers, but not properly fulfilling their duty of care obligations.
Last November, when he took the presidency of the Tire Industry Association (TIA), one of Wayne Croswell’s goals for his term was to increase the organisation’s presence in tyre recycling and other “green” issues. To achieve this goal, on January 14 TIA announced the creation of its new Environmental Advisory Council (EAC). The EAC, says the organisation, will provide strategic information, advisory services, educational programnes, and governmental assistance that promote environmental awareness throughout the tyre industry.
On 1 January 2010 producers of industrial and automotive batteries will be required to arrange the collection, treatment and recycling of such batteries, free of charge, if requested by business end-users and final holders. Key elements of the new regulations include: Requiring any persons placing batteries on the market to register as a producer of batteries, and report on waste batteries collected and sent for recycling
The Waste Batteries and Accumulators Regulations 2009 complement the existing Batteries and Accumulators (Placing on the Market) regulations 2008, which set out the requirements for introducing new batteries onto the market from 26 September last year. These regulations also introduce a ban on the landfill disposal or incineration of waste industrial and automotive batteries.
The US recently imposed tariffs aimed at preventing Chinese manufacturers from dumping cheap tyres in the market, and now China faces its own dumping problems of a different nature – customs officials there report seizing more than 8,500 tonnes of smuggled waste tyres sent from the US. According to the General Administration of Customs, some 366 shipping containers filled with tyres arrived in the coastal city of Guangzhou via Hong Kong between December 2008 and February 2009, where they remained until their discovery in December 2009. Three suspected smugglers were subsequently arrested.
Formula One is set to receive its first green technology sponsor following the signing of a multi-year partnership between the Virgin Racing team and Carbon Green. The US based company, as reported by tyrepress.com on December 10, primarily focuses upon pyrolysis based tyre recycling that permits the 100 per cent recycling of tyres and waste rubber into commercially viable marketable commodities of steel, oil and a carbon black substitute suitable for use in tyre and rubber manufacturing.
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