Getting rid of used tyres?

[Swoop]

Place over an Auckland Council parking attendant.
Pour liberally with petrol.
Light match and throw at tyre.

Walk away. Job done!

[Old Steve]

Back around 2000, I attended a recycling conference in Australia as many oil related disposal methods were being discussed. I think NZ has a pretty good system where the used oil replaces fuel in thermal intensive industries - paper and cement making - recycle, reuse, replace, reduce, using used oil as a fuel replaces virgin hydrocarbons and allows them to be used elsewhere.

Someone at the conference presented a paper suggesting that used tires could be reused by shredding them, transporting them to cement plants and using them as fuel - cement making is very thermal intensive. Apparently cement making also requires iron in the material mix as well, so not only would the rubber from the tires provide heat but the tires would provide a free iron contribution in the cement making.

Trouble was the cost of shredding and transport. If a recycling levy was charged on every new tire then there'd be a fund available to shred and transport the tires. But in Australia there seemed to be a political indifference or resistance to imposing a recycling levy on new tires, and there was already a huge backlog of used tires which hadn't contributed to the cost of recycling.

But, you have to start somewhere, sometime, don't you. When the topic came up in the news recently I wrote to Simon Bridges explaining how tires could be used to replace fuel at cement plants, but that same political indifference/inertia seems to apply here in NZ as well. Like the oil recycling initiative, maybe a tire recycling system needs to be driven by the cement makers and the tire industry.

I know people don't support a recycling levy being placed on new (or pre-used) tire sales. Maybe they'll change their minds when (not if) one of the large used tire dumps around the country catches fire. Burning tires produce carcinogens and soot in huge quantities, and are very hard to put out as well.

[Kickaha]

Someone at the conference presented a paper suggesting that used tires could be reused by shredding them, transporting them to cement plants and using them as fuel - cement making is very thermal intensive. Apparently cement making also requires iron in the material mix as well, so not only would the rubber from the tires provide heat but the tires would provide a free iron contribution in the cement making.

It's been done in other countries and I was told it was trialed here, the steel needs to be separated out and the rubber shredded into smaller chunks than what they could do here before it's burnt

[Jeff Sichoe]

just dump em in the china sea as payback for taking our fish

[Ocean1]

It's been done in other countries and I was told it was trialed here, the steel needs to be separated out and the rubber shredded into smaller chunks than what they could do here before it's burnt

You can buy shredders made here that'll do the job.

You don't want to burn them though, bad karma, there's several pyrolysis processes that can turn most of it into reasonable quality fuel safe to burn.

[Old Steve]

That's why they would have to be burnt in cement kilns, a cement kiln has exceptionally high temperatures and a long dwell time which ensures the complete combustion of the rubber. There's no need for an intermediate, energy intensive process to turn the tires into fuel, the shredded tires just go straight into the kiln with the raw materials. The iron doesn't have to be extracted from the rubber either. As the rubber burns, the steel from the tire belts is chemically associated with the limestone and whatever goes into making cement as an iron contributor to the clinker which goes on to be ground into cement.

Cement kilns are also a viable means of disposing of PCB and PCB contaminated transformer oil, the high temperature and long dwell time completely disassociate the PCB.