What Happens to Old Tyres in the UK? From Collection to Recycling

Updated on: 3rd March 2026 By:

The Scale of the UK’s Used Tyre Challenge

The UK generates approximately 55 million used tyres per year. This figure includes car, van, truck, agricultural, and OTR tyres from every source: tyre retailers fitting new rubber, vehicle scrapping operations, fleet operators replacing worn tyres, and farms replacing agricultural equipment tyres. Every tyre that comes off a vehicle needs to go somewhere.

Before 2003, a significant proportion simply went to landfill. The combination of the landfill ban on whole tyres (2003) and shredded tyres (2006), enforced under the Landfill Regulations, eliminated this route and forced the development of alternative processing pathways. Today, the UK’s used tyre management industry processes the majority of used tyres generated annually through a combination of material recycling, energy recovery, civil engineering applications, and retreading, with relatively small amounts going to export or residual non-compliant disposal.

Understanding what happens to old tyres, and which of these routes the tyres from your business are likely to take, matters for several reasons. It affects the documentation you need to maintain under the duty of care. It affects the commercial value of the tyres (some routes generate a credit for the generator; others involve a disposal charge). And it determines the environmental outcome of the disposal, which increasingly matters for supply chain sustainability reporting.

Gradeall International manufactures the tyre processing equipment that sits at the front end of several of these processing routes. The tyre recycling equipment range from Gradeall’s Dungannon, Northern Ireland facility processes tyres for civil engineering baling, sidewall cutting for volume reduction, rim separation, and specialist OTR tyre processing. With nearly 40 years of manufacturing experience and equipment in over 100 countries, Gradeall’s equipment is part of how UK tyres move from the vehicle to their next useful application.

Stage One: Collection and Primary Sorting

The journey of a used tyre begins when it is removed from a vehicle. At a tyre retail outlet, the removed tyre is stored temporarily in the workshop or a designated storage area before collection by a licensed tyre recycling contractor. At a vehicle dismantler or end-of-life vehicle processor, tyres are removed from vehicles and accumulated for collection. On a farm or at a quarry, large agricultural or OTR tyres may be stored where they are removed until a specialist collector can arrange transport.

The licensed tyre waste carrier collects tyres and transports them to a primary sorting or processing facility. At this stage, tyres are sorted by type (car, van, truck, agricultural, OTR) and by condition (suitable for retreading, suitable for further processing, too damaged for anything but shredding). This sorting determines which downstream processing route each tyre will follow.

Retreading assessment. Truck tyres in good structural condition are assessed for retreading viability. A tyre with sound casing and adequate tread depth can have new rubber applied over the existing casing, producing a retreaded tyre at significantly lower cost than a new tyre and with lower material use than manufacturing a new one. UK commercial fleet operators with structured tyre management programmes actively seek retreading as the first option for truck tyres.

Civil engineering baling assessment. Car and van tyres that don’t meet retreading criteria but are otherwise intact are candidates for tyre baling under PAS 108. These tyres have the most value as whole bales for civil engineering applications and are separated for baling rather than shredding.

Shredding and granulation stream. Tyres that are too damaged for retreading or civil engineering baling, plus truck and OTR tyres that are unsuitable for whole baling, go to shredding facilities for further processing.

Stage Two: Tyre Baling for Civil Engineering

The PAS 108 baling route is one of the most commercially valuable outcomes for whole passenger car and light van tyres. PAS 108 (BSI Publicly Available Specification 108) is the British Standard that defines the requirements for tyre bales used in civil engineering applications. A PAS 108-compliant bale contains approximately 100 passenger car tyres compressed to specific density and dimensional tolerances, wrapped in geotextile fabric to prevent tyre contact with soil.

Gradeall’s MKII tyre baler is the leading equipment for PAS 108 bale production in the UK and internationally, producing up to six bales per hour at the dimensional and density specifications the standard requires. The MK3 tyre baler and truck tyre baler extend the baling capability to larger tyre formats.

PAS 108 bales are used in a wide range of civil engineering applications. Road construction projects use them as lightweight fill material under embankments and behind retaining walls, reducing the load on underlying ground compared to conventional fill materials. Erosion control and coastal protection schemes use bale structures to absorb wave energy and stabilise slopes. Sustainable urban drainage systems incorporate tyre bales as permeable fill that allows water infiltration while providing structural support. Each of these applications uses tyre bales as a functional engineering material, consuming waste tyres that would otherwise require processing through shredding or energy recovery routes.

Stage Three: Sidewall Cutting and Volume Reduction

Before truck tyres, agricultural tyres, and OTR tyres can be processed through most recycling routes, their size must be reduced. A whole truck tyre is too large for most shredding equipment to handle efficiently, and too large for baling in standard tyre balers. Sidewall cutting removes the sidewalls from the tyre, leaving the tread band, and reduces the tyre’s volume significantly.

Gradeall’s truck tyre sidewall cutter removes sidewalls from truck tyres efficiently, processing them for onward handling through shredding, crumb rubber production, or tread band uses. The car tyre sidewall cutter similarly processes passenger tyres where sidewall removal is needed before subsequent processing.

For OTR tyres from earthmovers, mining equipment, and port handling machinery, the scale of the processing challenge is significantly greater. These tyres can weigh several tonnes each and have dimensions that require specialist cutting equipment. Gradeall’s OTR tyre sidewall cutter and OTR tyre splitter handle these large-format tyres, reducing them to manageable sections that can be processed further.

Stage Four: Shredding and Crumb Rubber Production

Tyres processed through shredding follow a sequence of size reduction stages that progressively convert whole or pre-cut tyres into crumb rubber, the fine rubber granulate that is the primary commercial output of the tyre shredding industry.

Primary shredding. Tyres enter a primary shredder that reduces them to large chips, typically 50 to 100mm. The steel wire reinforcement in car and truck tyres is released at this stage.

Steel separation. Magnetic separators extract the steel wire from the shredded rubber chips. The recovered steel is sold as scrap metal.

Secondary shredding and granulation. The rubber chips pass through further shredding and granulation stages that progressively reduce the particle size to the target crumb rubber granulate size, typically 0.5 to 4mm for most applications.

Fibre separation. Nylon and polyester textile fibres from the tyre’s fabric reinforcement are separated from the rubber granulate by air separation (aspiration) systems.

The resulting crumb rubber has numerous applications. Sports surfaces including artificial turf infill (though this application is under regulatory review in several European countries), rubber-modified asphalt for road surfacing, playground safety surfaces, equestrian surfaces, and rubber-bound products all use crumb rubber as a primary input.

Stage Five: Energy Recovery from Tyres

Tyres that cannot be economically recycled into material products, or that are too contaminated or degraded for recycling, may go to energy recovery. The calorific value of rubber is high; tyres have an energy content comparable to coal and approximately twice that of municipal solid waste.

Energy recovery from tyres takes several forms. Cement kilns use tyre-derived fuel as a substitute for coal, with the steel and ash from the tyres absorbed into the cement clinker rather than requiring separate disposal. Dedicated tyre-to-energy facilities combust tyres to generate heat and electricity. Both routes must operate under environmental permits that control emissions to air.

Pyrolysis, the thermal decomposition of rubber in the absence of oxygen, is a processing route that converts tyre rubber into pyrolysis oil, carbon black, and steel. The pyrolysis oil can be used as a fuel or as a chemical feedstock. Carbon black from tyre pyrolysis is potentially usable as a substitute for virgin carbon black in new rubber products, though quality consistency has historically been a challenge for this application. The pyrolysis route is growing in the UK and internationally as the technology matures and the economics improve.

Stage Six: Export

A proportion of UK used tyres are exported for processing overseas, primarily to developing markets where there is demand for used tyres as retreading casings or as products in their own right. Export of waste tyres is regulated under the UK’s implementation of the Basel Convention and the UK Waste Shipment Regulations; tyres exported for genuine reuse (as opposed to disposal) must meet specific conditions.

The export route for used tyres from the UK has historically been controversial, with concerns about tyres being classified as “reuse” exports when they are effectively waste disposal to countries with less stringent environmental controls. UK environmental regulators and border agencies monitor tyre exports for compliance with the applicable waste shipment regulations.

“The UK’s used tyre processing industry has developed significantly since the landfill ban, and the range of end-use applications for processed tyre material is broader now than it has ever been,” says Conor Murphy, Director of Gradeall International. “The equipment at the front end of the processing chain, the balers and sidewall cutters, determines the quality and commercial value of what comes out the other end. Well-processed tyre material has real value; poorly processed material creates problems throughout the chain.”

Contact Gradeall International for tyre processing equipment that produces commercially valuable output from used tyre streams.

Frequently Asked Questions

What percentage of UK tyres are recycled?

The UK achieves high diversion rates from landfill for used tyres, with the majority of used tyres processed through recycling, energy recovery, or civil engineering applications each year. Precise annual figures are published by the Tyre Recovery Association. Retreading, material recycling to crumb rubber, civil engineering baling, and energy recovery in cement kilns are the principal routes.

Are retreaded truck tyres as safe as new tyres?

Retreaded truck tyres produced to ECE Regulation 109 standards are legal for use on HGVs in the UK and are used extensively by professional fleet operators. The retread must be carried out on a sound casing by an approved remanufacturer. Properly retreaded tyres meet the same performance and safety standards as new tyres for their specified application.

Can I claim any environmental credits for proper tyre recycling?

Businesses with sustainability reporting obligations can document their tyre disposal route and the associated waste diversion from landfill. This documentation can support Scope 3 emissions reporting, sustainability reports, and supply chain sustainability requirements from customers. Contact your waste contractor for collection weight and disposal route documentation.

What happens to the steel from shredded tyres?

The steel wire recovered from shredded tyres during the crumb rubber production process is sold as scrap steel to steel recyclers and smelters. It is a commercially valuable by-product of tyre recycling; steel recovered from tyres contributes to the economics of the crumb rubber production process.