Tire recycling

Tire recycling is the industry and process of dealing with waste tires that can no longer be used on vehicles because of wear or irreparable damage, a practice also called rubber recycling. Tires are a difficult waste stream because so many are discarded, they are very durable and they do not biodegrade, so unmanaged stockpiles take up landfill space, cause rubber pollution and create fire hazards. Recovery routes include burning shredded tires as tire-derived fuel, with cement manufacturing the largest user, grinding them into crumb rubber for products, and using them in civil engineering projects. Pyrolysis and devulcanization are named as technologies that could make recycling easier. The source reports that scrap tire stockpiles in the United States fell from over one billion in 1990 to 67 million by 2015, and that the European Union raised the share of tires recycled from about a quarter of annual discards in 1994 to nearly 95 percent by 2010.