Recycling of old car tires

Despite the best efforts of modern science, the tires on your car rarely last as long as you keep your car. At some point, they will become worn or damaged and will need to be replaced. Many years ago, most people changed their own tires. Back then, old tires were a recycling nightmare. They were almost universally banned from city dumps and dumps. With no other options available, many people would simply dump their old tires in a roadside ditch at night when no one was looking. Those few companies that were willing to accept their old tires often ended up burning them. However, burning tires is an environmental disaster in almost every sense of the word. Arsenic, mercury, cadmium, lead, beryllium, chromium, and other toxic and carcinogenic substances and dioxins are released into the air when a car tire burns. Heart disease and respiratory problems can also be caused by metal particles released from a burning tire. Also, the natural resources that go into making a tire are wasted if the tire burns.

Today all that has changed. I had to change, there really were no other options. An estimated 1.3 billion tires are sold each year, and more than two-thirds of those tires replace old, worn tires. That means nearly a billion tires worldwide are thrown away annually. Twenty years ago, only 10 percent of all scrap tires were recycled, but today more than 80 percent make it to a recycling facility. Recycling old tire material is a good idea no matter how you look at it, and literally hundreds of apps have been developed to recycle old car tires.

Hardly anyone changes their own tires anymore, and recycling old tires is done by professionals who usually do it in an environmentally safe way. When you take your car in for a tire change at your local garage or tire shop, there is almost always a provision to take your old tires in for recycling. About 1 in 4 of those old tires are retreaded and used again on another car somewhere. In many parts of the world, old tires are ground up and used to make rubberized asphalt for highways or are crushed and used as a base for gravel roads or as a substitute for sand or gravel in some other road construction application. Some old tires are shredded and used as part of the surface for indoor tennis courts or other indoor sports fields. For many applications, recycling old tire rubber is cheaper than collecting and processing new rubber.

Tire burning has not completely disappeared, but it has improved to the point where it is safe for the environment and recycles raw materials. Through the use of a process called pyrolysis, which burns the tires in a reduced air or vacuum environment, the raw materials are recovered and recycled. A typical car tire will produce one kilogram of steel, four liters of oil, almost four kilograms of carbon and 850 liters of reusable fuel gas as a result of this recycling process.