By the numbers: Collection scheme closing in on 1m tyres

Thursday, 21 November 2024

New Zealand imports around 6.5 million tyres a year. We finally have a “stewardship” scheme to cope with them when they reach the end of their lives.

The Tyrewise scheme is closing in on collecting 1million used tyres for disposal since it launched on September 1.

After decades of importing of millions of tyres each year without much mind paid to how to dispose of them, New Zealand has a functioning “product stewardship” scheme for them.

Since March 1, the price of each tyre imported has resulted in a levy being paid towards a nationwide scheme to make sure they don’t end up in landfills, or stockpiled out of sight, out of mind.

So far, at 1.22pm on Wednesday, November 20, a total of 952,031 used tyres had been collected in the scheme since it started operating on September 1.

But, to the envy of government agencies like Stats New Zealand, data collection is constant, and real-time, and by 1.35pm the same day, the number had ticked up to 952,376.

Because of that, the numbers below are all from 4.20pm on Wednesday, and will have by the time you read this, be outdated.

Six

Adele Rose, chief executive of 3R Group, which manages the Tyrewise tyre stewardship scheme.

The number of “priority products” designated in New Zealand that cause such dangerous levels of pollution that they need to have a stewardship programme in place, though some remain a work-in-progress.

They are: tyres, e-waste, agrichemicals (and their containers), farm plastics, refrigerants (and other synthetic greenhouse gases) and plastic packaging.

40%

Adele Rose, chief executive of 3R Group, a private company that manages the Tyrewise scheme (and is partially-owned by Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1), says getting rid of used tyres had, over the years, seen a vast number go into landfill, while some had been exported as waste, and some, dismayingly for further use.

Tyre dumps will hopefully become a distant memory that we look back on with horror.

“Very near end-of-life tyres were being shipped to the Pacific Islands for continued use,” she says, though those days are now long gone.

There were also some strange and dismaying stockpiling stories in New Zealand, including secret stockpiles being amassed in places as varied as state houses and secluded rural properties.

Only around 40% of the roughly 6.5 million tyres imported each year were recycled, re-purposed, or used to create “tyre-derived” fuel.

There are a lot of “orphan” and “legacy” tyres from before the scheme that need disposing of. Work is under way on how many of them there are, where they are, and what to do with them.

“There will be millions and millions and millions and millions of them,” Rose says.

2006

Paddy Gower met an Auckland mechanic who would give his right arm for others... if he had one.

Date of the closure of the Lower Hutt Goodyear factory, the last tyre factory in the country.

1,586,476

The number of loose tyres imported into the country since March 1. That wasn’t even all the tyres that came into the country.

During that period, 144,428 vehicles were registered, with full complements of tyres.

$6.65

Levies collected in imported tyres depend on their size, says Rose: “But roughly it’s $6.65 per equivalent passenger unit, and an equivalent passenger unit is 9.5kg.”

“We've embedded the price of dealing with a tyre in the tyre price,” she says.

13,415

The number of collections of used tyres from the likes of tyre replacement businesses.

Golden Bay Cement has managed to reduce its climate emissions by burning tyres instead of coal.

6152

Tonnes of “tyre-derived fuel”. While some of the collected tyres are shredded and the materials re-used, such as in the manufacture of mobility ramps by clever Taranaki company Able Axcess, a large proportion are chipped and burnt as fuel at the Golden Bay Cement works, which makes around 60% of the country’s cement.

While that doesn’t sound like much of a win for the planet, it has seen a reduction in the emissions footprint of Golden Bay Cement, with each tyre burnt meaning some coal was not.

The company says: “Reducing our dependence on fossil fuel and replacing coal by 50% with waste tyres and construction wood waste, combined with the latest binder technology, has allowed us to offer today New Zealand’s lowest carbon GP cement at scale.”

In time, higher value products will be more commonly made from used tyres, Rose says, including use as an emulsifier in roading.

One company in Wellington is working to create earthquake shake dampeners for houses, like the industrial ones that are under the museum of Te Papa in Wellington, and another is using materials from end-of-life tyres to make glue.

80%

By 2028, Tyrewise aims to have reached a point where at least 80% of end-of-life tyres are collected, and processed through the scheme. By 2030, the aim is to be capturing 90% of used tyres.

However, if all goes to plan, New Zealand could help deal with end-of-life tyres from elsewhere in the Pacific.

“If you want a prediction, in seven years’ time we will be the net importer of end-of-life tyres from our Pacific neighbours, because we’ll have such a well established local market that we would have used all of the end-of-life tyres we’ve got, and we’ll need more from other people,” Rose says.