Tyre chipping facility opens outside Bristol

The facility has been built on the same site as the headquarters of waste tyre collection business Western Tyres, which hopes that the development will offer it a secure outlet for the used tyres it collects across the South-West.

And, Sapphire has claimed that there will be sufficient demand from the cement sector for the tyre chips produced by the process, despite the mothballing of cement kilns – including one of its parent company's kilns at Westbury in Wiltshire – as a result of a downturn in the construction market.

Explaining that tyre chips could potentially be sent to non-Lafarge kilns around the UK, a spokeswoman for Sapphire claimed that the cost savings from burning tyre chips in place of fossil fuels would ensure the chips found end markets.

“One of the benefits is that using tyres replaces the need to use expensive fuel, so, even if cement companies are using less fuel, tyres are still a more cost-effective option,” she told letsrecycle.com.

The Avonmouth processing facility, which began full operations at the start of this month, is being run by a team who have all transferred from Lafarge's kiln at Westbury which was mothballed earlier this year – a decision that forced Wiltshire county council to delay its plans to develop a mechanical biological treatment facility which it had hoped would produce refuse-derived fuel for the kilns (see letsrecycle.com story).

Benefits

Commenting on the benefits that developing the facility on land leased from Western Tyres could offer Sapphire, the company's sales, marketing and contract development manager, John Pickering, said: “We've had a long and healthy relationship with Western Tyres and have previously run a transfer station from the Avonmouth site.

“Developing a new processing facility at the site helps us to make our environmentally sustainable operations more accessible through close proximity to the M5 and many of our customers in nearby Bristol,” he added.

Sapphire

Earlier this year Sapphire Resource Recovery became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lafarge after the cement firm bought out previous joint-owner Michelin Tyres (see letsrecycle.com story).

The move also prompted a restructuring of Lafarge's resource recovery operations, which saw Glaciar, its subsidiary tasked with sourcing other waste-derived fuels and alternative raw materials for the cement business, merged with, and consequently absorbed into, Sapphire.

Among the other fuels Sapphire sources and manages are fly ash and iron, industrial wastes and by-products from the paper industry, as well as other liquid and recovered fuels.