Tyre recycling firm Tyregenics yesterday opened a £4 million facility in Baglan which uses liquid nitrogen to freeze tyre shred to -80 degrees C before smashing them into crumb.
Launching the facility, chairman of Tyregenics and Credential Environmental Andy Hinton said: “This is the first plant of its type in Northern Europe and we believe it will be a great success. It will recycle about five million used tyres a year into rubber products, steel and fibre and is sustainability in action.”
He added: “It is a robust solution to an environmental problem since both whole and shredded tyres were banned from landfill last year.”
Shredded
To feed the cryogenic plant, around a tenth of the 50 million waste tyres arising in the UK and half of those handled by Credential will be shredded at Credential plants in Breighton near Selby and Wednesbury in the West Midlands.
Shred will then be delivered to the Baglan plant where it will be frozen, treated with liquid nitrogen, shattered, screened and subjected to magnets to separate it into high-value rubber crumb, metal and fibre.
The liquid nitrogen used to freeze the tyres will come from a nearby BOC gases site, which produces the liquid as a by-product for making oxygen and was keen to find a local use for the product.
While there is currently no market for the fibre extracted in the process, the metal is sent to a local scrap yard and around 70% of the rubber crumb will be used by FieldTurf to turn into artificial sports surfaces.
Tyregenics Nick Wyatt, managing director of Tyregenics, explained that the company was also hopeful of finding markets for the remaining crumb in place of virgin rubber – which can cost up to £1,000 a tonne.
He said: “Field Turf will take around two-thirds of the production of the crumb but we are getting all types of enquiries from people looking to use in widely varying areas of manufacturing. The scarcity of rubber “crumb” and its value as a recycled green manufacturing alternative to other materials means there are many potential customers for the remaining production.”
Crumb
Mr Hinton explained that the advantage of using rubber crumb created through a freezing process to create sports surfaces as opposed to material created at room termperature was that the rubber broke down into a natural crystalline form rather than having jagged edges.
He said: “The crumb flows like a powder so it can be spread more easily on sports surfaces and when it rains it does not clog and move about like other material so companies are prepared to pay a premium for it.”
NISP
Ian Bryan, of the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme (NISP), said that the project was very unusual as it represented a partnership between a tyre recycler, reprocessors and end market which he would like to see more of in the recycling industry.
He said: “This is an extremely good example of industrial symbiosis with four different shareholders with a different interest in the business and making use of liquid nitrogen as a bi-product. It is an exemplar project.”
Tyregenics are now commissioning the plant and hope to become fully operational in the next few weeks.
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