Tyre recycling: in a roundabout way

Friday, 20 October 2017

The wheels on the bus go round and round, so the song goes.

But eventually they need to be replaced and the old tyres get put on a pile.

That pile grows by one tyre for every New Zealander each year, whether they drive or not and it never stops growing.

Now it's reached the stage where the tyres, and the industry supposed to recycle them, keep going round and round in a game of musical chairs where the incentive is on shifting the problem and clipping the ticket rather than solving it.

Overseas old tyres are being turned into everything from synthetic fabric to roading surfaces. But it's a costly business and one which a country priding itself on a clean and green image just can't seem to make work. 

Each tyre attracts a collection fee of between $3 to $5 for disposal. Tyre centres have bins full of tyres to be collected meaning all a tyre disposer has to do is drive by, collect them and send an invoice. Truck tyres cost even more to dispose of. It's a simple business case to pick them up and then worry about what to do with them.

As one insider puts it, 'there is no money in recycling tyres. There is only money in collecting them.'

A string of court cases and ratepayers being left picking up the tab for failed tyre ventures has put a large black ring around the issue that's becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

In September the owners of a Kawerau tyre pile, Alan and Angela Merrie, faced court for failing to adhere to an abatement notice issued by Bay of Plenty Regional Council  asking them to remove a tyre mountain from Kawerau and Waihi. 

Some of the tyres they had stored were collected from another failed tyre recycling yard in Frankton, Hamilton. This company collected a fee to store tyres before it went bust. Hamilton City Council picked up the tab and paid the Merrie's company, EcoVersion, $286,000 to collect 150,000 tyres. 

The ticket was clipped.

These tyres ended up in a quarry at Waihi as EcoVersion was already in breach of the terms of use of its Kawerau site. The quarry owners were to receive a storage fee also. 

Another ticket clipped.

After court proceedings the tyres were moved to another tyre yard just one kilometre away from the Kawerau site.

Another collection fee was paid to store the tyres.

Clip.

The Bay of Plenty Regional council will need to consider if the tyres need to be moved again but it is estimated there would be a $500,000 to $700,000 bill to pay if they were to be dumped in landfill.

Another ticket to potentially be clipped.

The cost to the Merries for breaching the abatement notice could be $30,000, but that's the cost of collecting just a thousand of the millions of tyres collected in the saga.

Another yard illustrates the scale of the tyre issue. 

Owned by Waste Management it sits near the rural town of Kerepehi on the Hauraki Plains. Here, approximately three million used tyres  - three fifths of the old tyres New Zealand discards every year - have been stored. 

The yard represents up to $15 million worth of waste tyres. But with the sort of collection fees being paid for tyres, a source in the industry says it doesn't cover the costs of operating the machines needed to break the tyres down into another reusable form. 

Waste Management was issued an abatement notice in early October ordering the tyres to be restacked into smaller, safer piles and to eventually be removed. 

According to the Companies Office website, Waste Management Ltd is owned by Beijing Capital Group, a Chinese state-owned enterprise.

The source said the number of tyres stored there had been heading up.

'The number of new tyres going there has just gone through the roof.

'On an average day they will would get about 2000 new tyres delivered,' the source said. 'It can be as high as 4000.'

The company was setting up a warehouse in Auckland, which should be operational by the end of this year and a tyre shredding plant will take care of them.

One of the big risks for tyres clumped in large numbers is a fire risk.  Tyre fires can be nearly impossible to extinguish and have devastating environmental effects.

Hamilton Fire Service's Roy Breeze said tyres are an ongoing problem for the fire service.

While not able to comment on specific tyre yards he said the biggest frustration is that they keep appearing.

'It is easy money to get tyres and chuck them in a big pile then not do anything about getting rid of them,' he said.

'You issue an abatement notice and the problem is just moved around. They keep turning up.'

It's an irony that fear of tyre fires, and the toxic gasses they would produce bring abatement notices but the ultimate end for most recycled tyres in New Zealand is to be turned into fuel and burned. 

Owen Douglas was prosecuted in 2006 by then-Environment Waikato after he failed to comply with an abatement notice around tyre storage.

He says burning tyres is the only practical solution to the landfill issue and he wants to see the cost to do so added to the cost of buying a tyre. 

Douglas purchased a tyre shredder and began making tyre-derived-fuel.

This is where the steel beading is removed from the tyres with the remainder cut into shards. These shards are shipped to concrete manufacturers where they are mixed with coal and burned. Tyre derived fuel can burn at 1250 degrees destroying the tyre but creating greenhouse gasses.

'You cannot recycle a tyre in New Zealand,' he said.

'You can only repurpose it.

'There is no money in tyres. There is money in collecting tyres but there is no money in shredding them. You can only burn them to get rid of them. The only problem is concrete places will not pay for it, or pay so little it is not worth producing.'

He thinks a $10 charge on the cost of new tyres would cover both the cost of collecting and processing old tyres.

Until that happens, it's business as usual on the tyre-go-round.

'Mountains of tyres pile up until they become a fire risk,' he said.

'Abatement orders are issued to move the tyres away so they are shipped to the next landfill and the cycle just continues.

'Operators who are paid to collect the tyres keep stacking them on, going 'bankrupt' and the problem is moved to somebody else. By the time the tyres are finally destroyed it is hard to know how many people have 'clipped' their ticket storing them.'

But the sort of industrial scale that can gather millions of tyres at Kerepehi could get others closer to a recycling solution, even if it's not entirely clean and green.

Earlier this year Waste Management announced a new recycling scheme this year for end-of-life tyres.

Waste Management General Manager Upper North Island Mike McSaveney, said further investment in new tyre shredding technology, which was supported with funding from the Ministry for the Environment, will result in a recycling solution through tyre-derived fuel.  

'We are now pleased to see our further investment, combined with Government support, has resulted in a New Zealand-based solution for the re-use of end-of-life tyres,' he said.

This tyre 'recycling' solution is paid for by the taxpayer.  

Golden Bay Cement was awarded a $13 million grant from the Waste Minimisation Fund to set up the infrastructure needed to incinerate old tyres. Waste Management was awarded $3.8 million to purchase the shredders needed to 'recycle' the tyres.

Others prefer not to see the future or recycling through a haze of burning tyre waste.

'Tyre rubber is a resource we have plenty of so we need to figure out how to do something with it rather than just burning it,' material scientist Marc Gaugler said.

Science research centre Scion, where Gaugler works, has also been awarded a grant under the Waste Minimisation Fund to research other solutions for old tyres as the piles continue to grow across New Zealand.

One aspect of their research project is investigating a process to devulcanise tyres to allowing the rubber to be used for other purposes.

In vulcanising a 'linker', usually sulfur, is added to the rubber in tyres to increase the molecular bonds and make the tyre stronger.

While this process makes for an incredibly durable tyre it also creates a problem where the finished product is nearly indestructible.

In the United States devulcanised tyres are used to create roading and other building materials but the process is difficult in New Zealand due to a lack of infrastructure to perform the process.

'Once the rubber is devulcanised it can also be added to virgin product and revulcanised to create more tyres.'  

Gaugler said Scion has managed to create several plastics using recycled rubber that are flexible and have several practical applications. 'The big problem will be eliminating the odour,' he said.

Waikato University Professor Alexander Gillespie said the government needs to help create a recycling market in order to encourage companies to do the right thing.

'The first step is to create a demand for recycled tyres,' he said.

'America uses recycled tyres for motorways so there is demand for the end product. (In New Zealand) There is no money to be made at the moment.'

Gillespie said some countries have mandates that phone books must be made from recycled papers. This in turn creates an opportunity for someone to profit from recycling while still providing a service. A similar approach could be used with waste tyres.

'Burning tyres is one way to get rid of them and I have no problem with that if you can collect all the harmful emissions from doing so,' Gillespie said.

'Then you need to offset the carbon emissions you cannot collect because you can't filter those out.'

A final solution is for the manufacturer of tyres to take responsibility for the product they produce. Essentially tyres are returned to the manufacturer for destruction once they reach the end of their useful life.

'If they are building a product and having it turn back up on their doorstep for destruction they would pretty soon figure out a better way to create their product for disposal,' Gillespie said.

In the meantime, the tyres go round and round.

Waikato Regional Councilor Kathy White said tyres need to be made a priority under the Waste Minimisation Act.

'Tyres are the sleeping giant,' she said. ' Sadly, governments normally ignore the risks posed by tyre stockpiles until they go up in flames and emit vast amounts of carcinogenic material into the atmosphere.

White said without mandatory schemes the tyres are just dumped on land and waterways that do not have rules protecting them.

It's a merry-go-round with councils all individually spending time and money trying to manage the problem without actually finding a solution. All of this happens because the government has failed to acknowledge how big a problem this is.'