Tyres are complex products essential to the mobility of millions of Europeans. Likewise, tyre recycling is essential to the sustainability of the entire tyre value chain, be it in terms of resource-efficiency or climate neutrality. Yet, despite a landmark landfill ban in 2006, much needs to be done to improve the circularity of tyres.
To give an order of magnitude, today, for one tyre that is recycled, one tyre gets incinerated for energy recovery and the worse in terms of end-markets opportunities is yet to come. Indeed, the European Union plans to:
- Ban the use of rubber infill materials used in artificial turf pitches that represents an average of 30% of end-markets;
- Restrict further the content of PAHs and other chemicals impacting the remaining 70% of the market.
Against such a situation, what can policy-makers and the whole tyre value chain do to boost the circularity of tyres?
EuRIC, which gathers the leading European tyre recyclers, believes that immediate policy actions are needed on all the different steps of the tyre value chain -from tyre design, collection and sorting, recycling, to the uptake of recycled materials into new tyres and other end-products. In particular, the upcoming European Sustainable Product Regulation (ESPR) alongside with the revision of the End-of-Life Vehicles Directive (ELVD) and Construction Product Regulation (CPR) have a key role to play in unlocking investments in tyre recycling in Europe and developing new end-markets that will support the objectives set by the European Green Deal and the new Circular Economy Action Plan.
This is all the more urgent to minimize the EU reliance on natural resources as rubber is a critical raw material in the EU, being mostly imported from South-East Asia for natural rubber and Russia for synthetic rubber.
We invite you to join the 8th edition of our Recyclers’ Talks series fully dedicated to tyre recycling in order to discuss with top-level policy-makers and experts how to boost the circularity of tyres alongside the value chain
Click on the link below for the latest version of the agenda
