Business van hire specialists Northgate Vehicle Hire has a UK fleet of 52,000 vehicles, mostly vans. As you can imagine, these vehicles get through a lot of tyres every year — 85,786 in 2012, to be precise.
These tyre are collected from Nortgate’s 60 UK depots by Vellco Ltd., which specialises in used tyre management. Vellco supplies all of the car and van tyres it collects to Sapphire Energy, a subsidiary of cement maker Lafarge. The tyres are shredded into 50mm pieces and then used as fuel in Lafarge’s cement kilns, instead of coal.
According to Northgate and Vellco, this process is environmentally beneficial, as it produces less nitrogen oxides than coal, while the energy released by burning the tyres is competitive with coal.
Not all tyres end up in a cement kiln, however — Northgate’s light truck tyres follow a different route. These tyres operate under much heavier loads than light vehicle tyres and, as a result, contain more steel than smaller car and van tyres.
To ensure that this steel component doesn’t go to waste, the light truck tyres are seperated into steel and rubber. The steel is recycled into new steel, while the rubber is ground down into small chips, or crumbs, that can be used to produce artificial sports surfaces and the springy black surfaces that have become so popular in children’s playgrounds in recent years.
It just goes to show that very little of our waste needs to go to landfill — and it’s entirely possible for recycling to be a profitable and efficient business.
One of the busiest roads in Scotland was resurfaced last year with the asphalt, containing shredded rubber from old tyres.
Tests were performed on grip and skid resistance, with engineers reporting that the rubber road, on a stretch of dual carriageway between Perth and Dundee, resulted in a quieter drive.