The Newark-based company, part of the Charles Lawrence Group (CLG), reprocesses around 4,000 tonnes of tyres into granulate each year. This is supplied to sister company Playtop which makes playground and sports surfaces.
At the moment Playtop supplies a raft of international customers in Bahrain, Finland, Japan, Oman, Spain and Poland. The company's international exhibitions this year have encouraged more business from developments in the Middle East and Thailand, triggering a 20% rise to nearly 5,000 tonnes of recycled tyres used by Playtop.
Director of CLI, Roger Hicks said “The UK has quite a mature market now so we mainly run the Playtop business for overseas customers.”
Customers
Including the amount of rubber the company recycles for Playtop, in total CLI reprocesses around 17,500 tonnes of waste tyres a year collected from companies such as Michelin and ATS. As well as Playtop, CLI supplies recycled rubber for a number of other surfacing companies.
Waste tyres are used by some companies as landfill liners or as fuel for cement kilns, but Mr Hicks said there is more value for the CLI in shredding tyres for surfacing. “We need all of the tyres we can get for the surfacing. There is more money in it for us than if we passed them on to a landfill or cement kilns,” he explained.
The company said the granulate produced from one tonne of tyres can be sold for 120. Thirty tyres make a tonne of granulate and a tonne can cover 30 sq meters of play surface.
Mr Hicks said all elements of the tyres are recycled. “One third is steel which we pass over to a steel reprocessor; there's a small amount of textile which we reprocess for industrial and equestrian activities and the two-thirds of rubber goes into the sports and play installation activities.”
CLI has been processing and reusing tyres since the early 1990s. Under the Landfill Directive, the disposal of whole tyres to landfill is banned and this ban will be extended to shredded tyres in July 2006.
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