One such organisation of this kind is the TRA – Tyre Recovery Association. It encourages tyre retailers to partake in a tyre recovery process involving recycling of old rubber into several high-demand products.
These products include floorings, carpet underlay, playground equipment and surfaces, sports pitches, athletic tracks and fuel for kilns. Moreover, advanced technologies can be employed for using old tyre crumbs as building material or to build quieter road surfaces.
Hall concludes that legal and safe disposal of tyres ensures smooth business operations for businesses in tyre and motor industries, as well as long-term safety for the environment.
Most reputable tyre fitting operations in the UK charge a recycling fee. Some smaller fitters hide the fee in their prices. Fees charges vary from outlet to outlet, chain to chain, but they are declared in most outlets, or on the invoices the customer gets. Check the next time you buy tyres from a chain store. Or ask at an independent what they do with their waste tyres.
The reputable tyre collection companies, such as Niramax, Vellco etc.. charge 31-35p per car tyre collected ( You can confirm by calling them).
This is a huge area of concern as the way the fees are collected and the UK tyre recovery sector is funded, there is no money available to fund research or raise market awareness of tyre issues. The free market does have its downsides. By compare Portugal, Spain, France Italy, for example, have tyre recycling bodies that have access to considerable funds to manage the waste tyre industry. South Africa has virtually nationalised the sector and all rubber sold in country has a waste levy, which goes to REDISA to fund recycling and build new industries based on tyre recycling.
Of course the National Tyre Dealers Association (NTDA) have a different side of the story, but ultimately, they charge a fee and make a profit from tyre disposal, even legal tyre disposal.
It is good that the blog raised awareness, but to say that tyres are expensive for the retailer to dispose of is, at best, questionable. You need to understand how the waste tyre industry works to appreciate why it works. Ultimately tyres ARE expensive to dispose of, but people all along the chain from the retailer to the end consumer all get paid to take them in.
Customer pays the retailer, retailer pays the collector, collector pays the processor, processor makes a profit from the sale of the end goods, or the use of tyres as fuel in cement kilns – Cement Kilns charge a “Gate fee” to take in waste tyres – it varies from about ￡35 – ￡60 per tonne. They pay , I don’t know today’s prices, but about ￡75 a tonne to burn oil or coal. If they substitute tyre derived fuel for fossil fuel they have an advantage of between ￡110 and ￡135 per tonne in fuel savings. The cement kilns in the UK use about 50,000 tonnes per annum, that’s a huge energy cost saving, it is also the equivalent of every waste tyre in Scotland being disposed off by one route every year. All along the supply chain people make money if they run their businesses efficiently.
I said tyres are expensive to dispose of… a tyre shredder, a good one, will have a ticket price of about ￡250,000, and a set of blades and wear parts to keep it running will cost ￡80,000 every time they need revewed. However, that does not mean there is no money to be made.
The article source: http://www.tyreblog.co.uk/2014/illegal-tyre-disposal-is-a-massive-environmental-threat-agree-garages-11866-2336