Estimated number of tyres in Russia that don’t get to recycling

Used tyres can become playground and sports ground surfaces, building materials or fuels.

Photo by: Setl Group

About 1 million tonnes of old car tyres are thrown away every year in Russia, of which only 150,000 tonnes are disposed of. This was reported by TASS, citing data from the Russian Ecological Operator (REO).

According to REO, the country has the capacity to recycle 400 thousand tons of tyres, but the increase in rubber recycling is hampered by eco-collection regulations.

“Manufacturers are now obliged to pay an environmental levy, but it does not cover the costs of recyclers, which makes it unprofitable for them to collect and recycle tyres. Because of this, there is a practice where car owners even have to pay extra for recycling their old tyres, so they end up sending waste to landfill which could have been recycled and reused.

This can be changed if the Extended Producer Responsibility Mechanism is fully implemented. As for now, every year, out of millions of waste tyres produced in our country, only one third can be recycled,” the agency quotes Denis Butsaev, head of REO, as saying.

Specialists from the Russian Ecological Operator clarified that fully recycling tyres into rubber for new treads remains a complex and expensive process. However, old tyres can be used to produce building materials, soft covering for children’s and sports grounds, turned into petroleum products and fuel for cement plants or into an analogue of natural gas.

“This summer, the Russian government approved a list of goods for state procurement, which will be subject to special ‘green’ requirements, including soft coatings: rubber tiles, rubber crumb coatings, soft roofing or other waterproofing materials.

We see great potential not only in the goods specified in the decree, but also in new materials used in construction, in particular in road construction, for example, in the production of modifiers for asphalt concrete. In addition to eliminating imperfections in the current legislation, we need to build cooperative chains and increase the demand for recycled resources,” Igor Zabralov, REO’s director for sustainable development, told reporters.

REO believes that the extended producer responsibility system will solve the problem of accumulation of old tyres within a year. In three to five years, recycling companies will be able to gradually dispose of tyre piles that have been piling up for decades.

Cover photo: Small_World / iStock