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Millions of tyres being sent from the UK to India for recycling are actually being “cooked” in makeshift furnaces causing serious health problems and huge environmental damage, the BBC has discovered.
The majority of the UK’s exported waste tyres are sold into the Indian black market, and this is well known within the industry, BBC File on 4 Investigates has been told.
“I don’t imagine there’s anybody in the industry that doesn’t know it’s happening,” says Elliot Mason, owner of one of the biggest tyre recycling plants in the UK.
Campaigners and many of those in the industry - including the Tyre Recovery Association (TRA) - say the government knows the UK is one of the worst offenders for exporting waste tyres for use in this way.
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Business Insider has a long running series called World Wide Waste, with some very interesting videos. One of them about this woman in Nigeria (!) who started a business recycling tires because her community literally got sick of the tires that where left behind everywhere around her. It really makes me sad rich western countries can make their trash disappear and have people in much worse conditions deal with the consequences. I really enjoy those videos by Business Insider because they shed a light on the people who do the right thing despite of the shit the worlds pulls on them.
https://www.businessinsider.com/one-nigerian-aims-to-recycle-millions-of-waste-tires-2023-10
It wasn’t as bad as I expected, TBH. They’re pyrolising them, not burning them in the open. The plants still end up causing pollution, but not intrinsically due to what they are so much as just India-level regulational scrutiny.
There is a before & after google earth link in the article that shows different.
Yep. They’re probably cleaning out the chambers directly onto the ground and scrubbing none of the waste gas. Maybe not even burning it off in the first place. Again, this is not an orderly, developed country. The same would be true if they were cleaning silicon for solar panels or whatever green thing you’d prefer.
The headline makes it sound like they’re just burning them, not turning them back into crude.
So the problem is not pyrolysis, it’s that India is unable to enforce environmental regulations on its pyrolysis plants.
Sort of. The root issue is that it’s not economical to dispose of tires. They’re designed to be durable, so when they’ve reached the end of their lifetime… what do you do with them? You can’t really reuse them because they leach microplastics and harmful chemicals. Recycling is more expensive than buying new. There’s no clean way to dispose of them at all.
Properly managed, the outputs of tire pyrolysis are syngas, carbon black, and steel. All of those are valuable reclaimed resources.
The idea behind tire recycling fees is to incentivize that sort of reuse that might not be economic on its own.
For more context for the article, there’s this line that I think is pertinent.
“The Indian government has made it illegal for imported tyres to be used for pyrolysis.”
So even if its possible to execute pyrolysis safely, the government doesn’t allow it for imports from the UK.
Yeah, but I’m sure that it costs more to pyrolize than you’d make by selling the products. And I’m sure this facility isn’t properly managed. Thus, corners are cut to make it just profitable enough, laws and environment be damned.
Isn’t there a beach over there with a mountain of used tires?
Ah so that’s why the upper Indian subcontinent is always filled with smog lol
As someone who is punctured and deflated, I am against throwing flat tires in furnaces. I stand with the tires.
