Solideal hopes to recycle up to 80,000 tyres this year

By Melissa Barnett

Unexpected high demand for raw rubber over the past few years and increased global pressure to reduce industrial waste has caused many users and manufacturers of rubber-based products to rethink their rubber use. One of the biggest tyre manufacturers, Solideal, has developed a tyre recycling program which helps offset rubber price increases while also reducing the company's environmental footprint.

Tyre recycling in the past has been fraught with difficulties. Collection and transport have been expensive due to the bulky nature of used tyres, and the technology required to extract reusable tyre components has, until recently, been lacking.

A rubber tyre usually contains, along with rubber, quantities of steel, fibre, carbon and oil. In the manufacturing process, these components are baked together and vulcanised to form a solid sheet which is then made into tyres. In the recycling process, the vulcanisation has to be reversed, effectively separating each of the ingredients. The devulcanisation process has been compared to "unbaking the cake and reusing the eggs", according to Solideal spokesman Antal Takacs.

Solideal hopes to recycle up to 80,000 tyres this year in its two recycling projects. One involves the recovery of scrap metal, while the second involves shredding old Solideal tyres to recreate a new budget-brand tyre range. This program has been in operation for the past eight years and claims to re-use up to 50% of the old tyre.

Each of the recycling programs is designed to complement and support the existing product lines manufactured by Solideal. All of the recycling is done in Solideal's Sri Lankan factories, with research and development shared between Sri Lanka and Belgium.

Takacs says the company hopes to achieve a recycling target of 60,000 used press-on tyres and 20,000 resilient tyres per annum. Although this figure is a drop in the ocean compared to the 1.6 billion tyres used throughout the world each year, Solideal has taken significant steps in reducing its environmental footprint and in showing that good business can be achieved through recycling.