Car Tyre Sidewall Cutting: Efficient Processing of Passenger Tyres

By:     Kieran Donnelly

Expert review by:     Conor Murphy

Car tyres are the most common category of waste tyre in the UK, with approximately 50 million generated each year. For tyre recycling operations processing them at volume, the question is not whether to handle car tyres but how to do it most efficiently. Sidewall cutting before baling is the process step that makes the biggest single difference to output quality, bale density, and transport economics. This guide explains why that is, how the equipment works, and how to integrate it into a practical processing operation.

Why the Car Tyre Sidewall Creates Processing Problems

A car tyre is engineered to maintain its circular shape under load. The sidewall achieves this through a combination of rubber compound and textile cord reinforcement that gives the tyre its spring and flexibility, while resisting deformation under the vehicle’s weight. In a waste processing context, this structural resistance works against the baler.

When a whole car tyre enters a baler, the sidewall pushes back against the compression force. The tyre takes longer to compress to the target density, requires more hydraulic pressure to reach it, and produces a bale with more void space than a tyre with the sidewall removed. Over a shift of hundreds of tyres, the cumulative effect is lower throughput, higher energy use per bale, and increased baler wear.

Cut the sidewall out first, and the remaining tread ring collapses under a fraction of the compressive force. The tread section has no structural memory to resist flattening; it compresses quickly, consistently, and to a higher density than the whole tyre. This single step, adding a sidewall cutter to the process before the baler, changes the operating economics of a car tyre recycling operation.

The Car Tyre Sidewall Cutter: Equipment Overview

Gradeall’s car tyre sidewall cutter is designed specifically for passenger car and light van tyres. The machine uses a hydraulically driven blade assembly to cut cleanly through the tyre sidewall in a single stroke, producing two sidewall sections and a tread ring per tyre. The process takes under 12 seconds per cycle, and an experienced operator can achieve 300 to 400 tyres per hour.

The machine produces a consistent cut regardless of operator experience or fatigue. The blade geometry and cut depth are set by the machine, not by the operator, so every tread ring comes out to the same profile. This consistency matters for PAS 108 bale production, where uniform tread ring sections load more predictably into the baler and produce more consistent bale dimensions and mass.

Bale Density: What Sidewall Cutting Actually Achieves

The density improvement from sidewall cutting is the most commercially important benefit. A standard car tyre bale produced from whole tyres typically achieves 400 to 550 kg per bale depending on tyre size and baler specification. The same baler, processing the same tyres with sidewalls removed, typically achieves 650 to 900 kg per bale. That is a density improvement of 40 to 60%.

In transport terms, a higher-density bale means more rubber mass per lorry load, which reduces the number of transport runs per tonne of material and cuts the transport cost per tonne to the end market. If tyre bales go to a civil engineering contractor or energy recovery facility at a price per tonne, a denser bale means more revenue from the same number of baling cycles. Across a full year of production, the economic effect of this density improvement is significant.

PAS 108 Compliance and Bale Quality

PAS 108 is the British Standard for tyre bales used in civil engineering and construction applications. It specifies bale dimensions, minimum mass, tyre composition requirements, and the tying specification that must be met for bales to be used in compliant civil engineering projects. Bales produced from whole car tyres can meet PAS 108 when correctly formed, but bales from sidewall-cut tyres are easier to produce consistently to specification because the tread sections compress more uniformly.

For operations supplying the civil engineering bale market, consistency of output is as important as achieving compliance once. A contractor specifying PAS 108 bales for an embankment project needs confidence that every bale in the delivery meets the standard, not just the ones that happened to compress well that day. The MKII tyre baler is designed to produce PAS 108 bales at up to 6 bales per hour. Combining it with a sidewall cutter on the input side improves both the throughput rate and the consistency of the output bales.

Managing the Sidewall Sections: Output Planning

Sidewall cutting produces a significant volume of secondary material. At 300 tyres per hour, with two sidewall sections per tyre averaging 0.8 kg each, the sidewall output rate is around 480 kg per hour. This material accumulates quickly and needs a collection system, storage arrangement, and pre-arranged disposal route before scaling up the cutting operation.

Car tyre sidewall sections are accepted at energy recovery facilities, including cement kilns that use tyre-derived fuel as a substitute for conventional fuels. Some operations arrange direct collection by a licensed TDF contractor. Others accumulate sidewall sections in skips and arrange periodic collection. Either approach works, but the arrangement must be in place before the machine runs at full capacity. Arriving at the end of a shift with several tonnes of sidewall sections and no disposal route is an avoidable problem.

Position a collection skip or purpose-built bin at the sidewall cutter’s ejection point, sized for at least two hours’ production between empties. For high-volume operations, a dedicated conveyor system to transport sidewall sections to a separate storage area improves the flow around the machine.

Integrating the Sidewall Cutter into the Processing Line

The most efficient layout for a car tyre sidewall cutting and baling operation positions the sidewall cutter between the incoming tyre feed area and the baler. The workflow is: tyres arrive, sidewalls are cut, tread rings move to the baler input. With a conveyor between the cutter and the baler, the two machines can run at their individual optimal rates without creating queuing or wait time.

Single-operator running is possible for many operations. The operator loads the sidewall cutter, the machine cycles, the operator removes the tread ring and loads it into the baler while the cutter is completing the next cycle. At higher volumes, separating the cutter and baler into two operator positions improves throughput and reduces the physical demand on each operator. The inclined tyre baler conveyor feeds tread rings directly into the baler chamber, reducing the manual loading step further.

Conor Murphy, Director of Gradeall International

Car tyre sidewall cutting is one of those investments that pays back quickly and keeps paying. The density improvement alone typically justifies the machine within the first year at reasonable processing volumes. Beyond the numbers, operators notice the difference immediately: the baler cycles faster, the output is more consistent, and there is less wear on the baler. It’s a straightforward addition to a baling operation that makes everything else work better.”

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