News and feature articles relating to recycling, including collection, of end of life tyres.
Goodyear Dunlop’s Truck team have secured a fleet deal with Hargreaves Services, the UK’s biggest bulk haulage company. The deal will see 879 vehicles fitted with the latest Max Technology tyres from Goodyear during the company’s five year contract with the truck tyre giant.
A Cheshire school has found an environmental solution for its new playground and basketball court with the help of Bridgestone UK. This solution comes in the form of recycled truck tyres; the granular rubber material made from the tyres covers the 500 metre square surface is said to be soft, safe, porous and able to be coloured – in other words, says Bridgestone, an ideal material for sports and recreation. Work started at Easter and was completed in June.
According to a West Sussex Fire and Rescue Service spokesman, arson is suspected in the Sunday night fire at Envirowaste in Yapton. Two HGV trailers and almost 2,000 tyres were consumed in the fire at the tyre recycling facility on the evening of November 23.
Spokesman Gary Towson reported that the area where the fire took place “is in a secure compound and there is no obvious reason for it to catch fire.” He said fire and police investigations officers are now investigating the incident.
The Roesler Group has announced that it is to support its core retreading business with a product branded “Roesler 360”. The new offering comprises what the company terms a “fully integrated ‘Total Tyre Management System’” for buyers, maintenance workshops, operators and users of EM and OTR tyres. Roesler says that it will offer customers “a complete tyre quality management, performance enhancing and tracking facility that ranges from first fitment, right through to the end of tyre life disposal and recycling.”
Roesler 360 incorporates the combined expertise, technical innovation, manufacturing and site servicing capabilities of the Roesler Group, its comprehensive range of tyre types and sizes and its diversity of applications. It will provide a highly flexible, customer focused and traceable system, which manages, analyses and reports a tyre’s total life cycle. It also features data on the tyre’s selection, fitment, use, performance, servicing, retreading and ultimate disposal, allowing the tyre to be fully optimised in terms of continuously improving its running costs, hours, safety, reliability and carbon footprint.
National Tyres and Autocare has received the ‘Retailer of the Year’ award by the Tyre Recovery Association (TRA) for “demonstrating consistent concern for the responsible recycling of end of life tyres.” Gary Pugh, group audit director for the Axle Group, which includes National Tyres and Autocare, National Fleet and Viking International, accepted the award from John Campbell, director, Vellco Limited, National’s waste management partner.
“National, working together with Vellco Limited, will achieve a zero carbon footprint during 2009, which supports our overall goal of minimising environmental impact in all the varying processes in which the company is involved,” Pugh commented.
It’s as fresh as the morning dew upon a rainforest fern frond – Bridgestone Europe has published its updated environmental report, which sets out the company’s commitment to high environmental standards and the latest steps it is taking to achieve them. In keeping with its theme, the colour brochure is printed with vegetable-based inks on FSC label recycled paper, and is aimed at all organisations and groups interested in the company, including shareholders, government authorities, journalists, car manufacturers and other business partners.
British company PYReco reports its first UK facility to extract raw materials from end of life tyres through pyrolysis is now at the planning stage. The plant, to be located in Teesside, is expected to recover more than a quarter of a million barrels of oil equivalent per annum and 20,000 tonnes of carbon black, along with other materials.
The construction of the new facility comes following a decade of research and development conducted by Metso Minerals, with whom PYReco has been affiliated for the last two years. These tests have been carried out at Metso’s Process Research & Test Center in Pennsylvania, USA, a fully equipped pyrolysis test facility with a scrap tyre feeding capacity of over 100 kg/hr.
Before Kwik-Fit invested in a National Distribution Centre, there was a problem with tyre deliveries. All of the fast-fit chain’s main suppliers were delivering to all of its 670-odd active branches two to three times a week, which was expensive for the delivering manufacturers and disruptive to the Kwik-Fit branches. The answer? Build a specialist centre in cooperation with a leading third party logistics supplier and deliver all the brands in one go. Keen to get an effective new service up and running as soon as possible, Kwik-Fit GB Ltd appointed CEVA Logistics to manage and operate the new Corby-based National Distribution Centre (NDC) and its transport operation in June, before stocking up the site and getting systems up to speed this summer. In October, four months and somewhere in the order of £10 million of investment later, Tyres & Accessories met with Kwik-Fit Fleet sales director, Mike Wise; head of supply chain, Neil Arnott; and Toby Leybourne product director-tyres for an exclusive tour of the state-of-the-art site.
Looking back to the 1970s and 1980s Kwik-Fit sold just 25 different sizes. As anyone in the trade knows, today it is a completely different story and there are up to 700 different size and brand products in the premium segment alone. Something that, according T&A’s Kwik-Fit tour guides, is “a monster to control.” At the same time the floor and storage space available to individual Kwik-Fit branches remains pretty much the same as it was two decades ago. Toby Leybourne summarized the pragmatic thinking behind the project like this: “Having 90 depots inside the M25, for example, means logistics is key, but now Kwik-Fit’s nightmare has become an opportunity.” Head of Kwik-Fit Fleet, Mike Wise added: “Virtually every new vehicle launched comes to the market with a new tyre size…The proliferation of tyre sizes has made it a necessity that Kwik-Fit has its own distribution operation and is not reliant on tyre manufacturers to deliver tyres to centres, which can take several days.”
A man with a passion for tyres and food from his homeland has created a business with a difference in the US. Victor Galindo, originally from the small Mexican village of Tene, is the proprietor of Victor’s Tires and Custom wheels in Salt Lake City, Utah. What sets Victor’s apart is that customers can not only leave the premises with a brand spanking new set of tyres – they can also roll out the door with a full stomach and singing taste buds.
Fresh off the 2008 SEMA Show, TIA has turned its focus on the the 2009 Commercial Tire, Retread & Recycling Conference (CTRRC), which will be held at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando on Feb. 9-11. The CTRRC will again be held in conjunction with the American Trucking Association’s Technology and Maintenance Council (TMC) annual meeting.
As part of the CTRRC, TIA is bringing back the Retread Appearance Contest, which will be held at the TIA Retread Pavilion. In a twist from previous years, this year’s Retread Appearance Contest will be voted on by the TMC fleet attendees. Details on the Retread Appearance Contest are available at TIA’s Web site at www.tireindustry.org. (Tire Review/Akron)
Zeus’s new generation puncture proofing material called (TRIOfil) drastically reduces tyre related downtime on front end loaders, particularly those operating in the waste, quarrying and mining sectors, according to the company’s tyre flat proofing solutions team. With a new rubber material specification uniquely formulated into its original urethane mix, Zeus’s new TRIOfill is said to be a more effective flat proofing solutions, which also delivers a much cleaner, greener and higher level of physical properties than current products on the market today.
In the drive to operate in a more waste conscious environment, TRIOfill has been developed with recycling in mind, where the aim was not only to more fully enhance current tyre filling performance standards, properties and flexibility of formulations, but also to embrace low carbon technologies, materials and processes in its manufacture and operation.
As a member of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Partnership for Environmental Priorities (NPEP) programme, Bridgestone’s BFS Retail & Commercial Operations, LLC (BFRC) was honoured recently at the WasteWise & NPEP Conference for recycling some 145,000 kilograms of lead from lead wheel weights in 2007.
In addition to its ongoing efforts to further reduce the impact of lead on the environment, BFRC launched a US-wide environmental initiative in January 2008 to install non-toxic steel wheel weights instead of lead weights in its customers’ vehicles. BFRC, a member of the Bridgestone Americas (BSA) family, was the first of the major chains in the automotive repair industry to make the switch to steel wheel weights in this market. All of BFRC’s approximately 2,000 US automotive service store locations are switching to more ecologically sensitive, non-toxic steel weights, replacing millions of lead wheel weights each year.
Zesu, an international leader in tyre flat proofing for large earthmover, OTR and industrial tyres, is now offering “a complete solution for the prevention of all punctures, blow-outs and inconsistent tyre pressures in tyres used by straddle carriers.”
This unique solution lies in Zeus’s new and next generation three-part ‘TRIOfill’ poly-urethane flat-proofing product. This completely redesigned formulation, not only incorporates revolutionary virgin rubber content, but also delivers a much cleaner, greener and higher level of physical properties not to mention a new electrically driven tyre filling system.
Official figures now put attendance at this year’s CITExpo at 6860 visitors and 311 exhibitors. With at least three main tyre exhibitions operating in China, not to mention a tyre recycling and retreading fair, other related rubber conferences, and other exhibitions in the Far East T&A asked if there will be a kind of consolidation in the show sector, with the more provincial exhibitions ceasing to be international scale events. Wilko Fong, director of CITExpo organisers, Reliable Exhibitions, shied away from commenting on the relative success of other exhibitions. Instead he preferred to quantify CITExpo’s success on its own merits: “CITExpo is now a mature show and while it is still growing now, after 6 years future growth is likely to level off and mature. The show is likely to become a more regular established show for tyres.”
CITExpo has a character of its own. There may not have been a full complement of the top 10 Chinese tyre manufacturers present at the 2008 show, but large scale manufacturers such as Triangle and Sibur took very significant sized stands. Sibur’s reasoning for its involvement with CITExpo was particularly telling. Bearing in mind the fact that, at present, the large Russian manufacturer generally exports economy-orientated truck tyres, China (home to probably the largest manufacturing base for this level of products in the world) is unlikely to be the end destination the company was aiming to reach. In stead Sibur invested in exhibiting at CITExpo in order to meet European buyers sent east to procure next year’s stocks.
The ETRMA has confirmed that, last year, the European recovery rate for end of life tyres exceeded 91 per cent, a rate more than 4 per cent higher than the previous year. This positive trend means that Europe is now one of the most advanced regions in the world in the recycling and recovery of tyres, ahead of, for example, Japan, which has a recovery rate of 89 per cent and Canada, at 80 per cent. And while the UK recovery rate, at 95 per cent, is above the European average, it still lags behind the 11 European countries that have achieved a recovery rate of 100 per cent.
If you would like the latest news from the Chinese tyre industry in Chinese, visit our partner site TyrepressChina.com. Or click below to continue on Tyrepress.
