The Luton-based firm intends to use the heat treatment technology to recycle recovered tyres back into material capable of producing new tyres at its planned £80 million facility at the South Tees Eco Park near Middlesbrough.
The company claims that the use of externally applied heat to decompose the tyres is a more environmental approach to tyre recycling than is currently available, and will enable it to recycle all component parts of recovered tyres.
Noel Harasyn, managing director of PYReco, told letsrecycle.com: “At the moment tyres are crumbed and turned into pony paddocks and playgrounds and many are burnt in combustion kilns, while what we will be able to do is offer environmental compliance because what we do has no harmful emissions and we are turning the tyres back into their component parts.”
Plant
The proposed plant on the 17-acre site is intended to shred 60,000 tonnes of recycled tyres each year, and convert them back into steel, carbon black, oil and gas. PYReco also intends to process rubber materials arising in motor vehicle manufacturing, such as belts, hoses, windscreen surrounds, wipers, floor mats and mud flaps.
The facility is set to take 18 months to build and is planned around a central heat chamber, which the company claims will produce no noxious emissions and draw off gas and oil as they vaporise. According to PYReco, this will leave carbon char and steel to be extracted for further processing and lessen the environmental impact of the process.
PYReco has also said that it intends to use the oil and gas produced during the central heat chamber stage at the Teeside facility to generate electricity for the home market, and predicts it will be capable of producing 17 MW of electricity a year. The company also claims that it will create 22 tonnes of recovered steel each day, using 5% of the carbon to create the same amount of virgin steel.
Pilot
Having worked with Finnish company Metso Minerals, a subsidiary of engineering firm Metso Corporation, PYReco has developed the proposal for the plant based on a pilot pyrolysis processing facility run by Metso in Danville, Pennsylvania.
Use of pyrolysis in developing the PYReco plant is the latest in a series of technological advances in the field of tyre recycling, as Yorkshire-based tyre recycling firm Credential Environmental last year unveiled a £4.1 million facility in Neath, South Wales, where tyres are frozen in liquid nitrogen before being smashed into crumb (see letsrecycle.com story).
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