Turning Australia’s Tyre-Recovery Numbers into Real Circularity – and the Role Hard Recycle Plays

INTRO

Tyre Stewardship Australia’s newest material-flow analysis makes one fact impossible to ignore: the country is sliding backwards on genuine tyre recycling even while the headline recovery rate looks healthy. In the 2023-24 financial year Australians generated about 537 000 tonnes of end-of-life (EOL) tyres. Sixty-six per cent of that total avoided landfill or stockpiling, yet only one quarter – roughly 26 per cent – was actually reused or mechanically recycled. The rest was either burned as tyre-derived fuel (TDF) in overseas cement kilns or buried on mine sites. In other words, most recovered tonnes still leave the material loop for good.

Why “Recovery” Is Not Enough

Recovery is a broad accounting term that covers any outcome other than conventional landfill. It embraces everything from high-value retreading all the way down to one-off civil engineering fill or direct combustion for energy. From a circular-economy perspective the hierarchy is clear:

1. Reuse and retread – keeps the product whole and delays disposal.

2. Mechanical recycling – liberates rubber, textile and steel for re-manufacture.

3. Advanced recycling – pyrolysis or devulcanisation that breaks rubber back to oil, gas and carbon black.

4. Energy recovery – a last resort that destroys the resource forever once burned.

When roughly 40 per cent of all EOL tyres become exported TDF and another 30 per cent are still landfilled or buried, there is substantial room for improvement.

Two Very Different Waste Streams

• Passenger, truck and bus tyres are collected relatively efficiently. Around 87 per cent avoid landfill, but more than half of that mass is shipped offshore as TDF.

• Off-the-road (OTR) mining, agricultural and construction tyres tell the opposite story. Less than 15 per cent are recovered at all, and the remainder – well over 100 000 tonnes last year – are routinely buried in remote mine pits because transport and downsizing costs are prohibitive.

Any national solution must therefore deal with two challenges simultaneously: lifting the quality of processing in the on-road sector and creating a viable pathway for some of the largest tyres on earth.

Capacity and Infrastructure Gaps

Domestic mechanical-recycling plant capacity stands at roughly 86 000 tonnes per year, only one-sixth of annual generation. New installations are arriving – a 40 000-tonne shredding and crumbing complex in East Rockingham, an upgraded high-throughput line in Adelaide, and feasibility studies for an 80 000-tonne continuous-pyrolysis facility in Geelong – but the current pipeline still leaves a gap of at least 200 000 tonnes a year between volume generated and high-value local processing.

Technical and Logistical Obstacles

• Tyre size and weight – OTR tyres can be three metres in diameter and weigh four tonnes. They demand high-torque shears or primary shredders capable of instantaneous reversal under load, plus engineered in-feed and discharge systems that will not bind or stall.

• Remote geography – Most OTR waste is produced in Western Australia, Queensland’s Bowen Basin and the Northern Territory, thousands of kilometres from coastal processors. Freight alone can exceed the gate fee at a recycler.

• Feedstock quality – Granulators, rasper trains, pyrolysis reactors and devulcanisers all need wire-free, size-controlled rubber with minimal moisture and fibre. Poor liberation of bead wire or inadequate fibre extraction escalates downtime and contaminant rejects.

• End-market development – Recovered crumb rubber can displace polymer-modified bitumen in road asphalt and replace virgin polymer in rubber moulding compounds, but those markets are still smaller than the potential supply. Recovered carbon black quality standards are only now being codified in Australia.

Policy Direction

The voluntary Tyre Product Stewardship Scheme has plateaued. TSA has therefore called for mandatory stewardship that would expand liability to every importer and accelerate investment in domestic processing. Parallel proposals would require public-sector road, rail and civil works to preference crumb-rubber modified products, guaranteeing demand for higher-value outputs.

What Hard Recycle Brings to the Equation

Hard Recycle supplies, designs and integrates the machinery and engineering services needed to close the gap between “recovery” and true circularity. The strength of the offer lies in a portfolio of specialised European manufacturers that cover every processing stage, backed by local engineering, installation and lifecycle support.

1. Primary Shredding and Shearing – ITR and MLS Makina

For mixed passenger-car and truck feedstocks Hard Recycle specifies modular twin-shaft shredders from ITR that produce a consistent 120- to 400-millimetre chip in a single pass. For ultra-large OTR casings, MLS Makina primary shredders and hydraulic guillotine shears can downsize tyres up to 4 tonnes, eliminating steel bead kick-back and reducing whole-tyre transport cost by up to 60 per cent before haulage.

2. Controlled Granulation and Fibre Liberation – ITR and Tecnofer

Once tyres are pre-shredded, high-speed rasper and granulator trains from ITR mill the chips to sub-20-millimetre granulate. At that point Tecnofer’s modular polishing mills and washing systems take over, removing residual textile fluff and surface contaminants so that the final crumb meets the cleanliness targets demanded by devulcanisation and pyrolysis operators.

3. Precision Screening – Zemmler Double-Trommel Technology

Uniform particle size is essential for stable feed to pyrolysis reactors or the hot-mix asphalt pugmill. Zemmler multi-fraction trommel screens, with their patented double-drum construction, simultaneously extract oversize and fines in one step. Adjustable screen plates mean the same unit can produce 20-millimetre crumb for sports surfaces or 6-millimetre granulate for recovered-carbon-black production without a full wash-down changeover.

4. Clean and Reliable Conveying – ARP and Lanner

From the first discharge conveyor to the final bulk bag filler, Hard Recycle uses enclosed screw-flight technology from ARP to minimise dust and spillage. Where liberated steel cord is recovered, inline centrifugal separators from Lanner spin out entrained rubber and moisture, delivering furnace-ready steel scrap and keeping downstream magnets free from build-up.

5. Bulk Handling and Dosing – AZO Silos and Weighing Systems

Advanced recycling plants thrive on steady-state operation. AZO outdoor silos and in-line gravimetric feeders store and meter crumb rubber at accuracies down to ±0.5 per cent, preventing the feed surges that can destabilise reactor temperature profiles or overload the oxidiser on a devulcanisation line.

6. Air Quality Management – OMAR Pulse-Jet Baghouses

Rubber dust carries both odour and respirable particulates. OMAR high-vacuum, reverse-pulse baghouses integrate directly above ITR or MLS shredder hoppers and granulator towers. Custom inlet plenums balance airflow, while cartridge media rated at ISO 16890 EPM1 keep emissions well below regulatory limits, even during high-humidity start-up.

7. Engineering, EPC and Life-Cycle Support – Hard Recycle

The hardware is only half the equation. Hard Recycle’s engineers tailor plant layouts to local grid constraints, design structural steelwork and foundations, manage compliance with state and territory environmental approvals, and commission SCADA control systems that capture real-time production data for TSA audit reporting. A Brisbane-based spares warehouse guarantees critical components – knives, screens, filter bags, hydraulic packs – within 24 hours anywhere on the east coast.

Illustrative Project Pathways

• Regional crumb-rubber hub – A council in northern New South Wales can process 20 000 tonnes a year of passenger and truck tyres with an ITR twin-shaft shredder, Tecnofer granulation island, Zemmler double-trommel sizing and OMAR dust filtration. The plant feeds crumb directly into asphalt plants participating in state-funded road-upgrade programs.

• Mine-site downsizing package – A Pilbara iron-ore operator deploys a containerised MLS Makina shear coupled to a diesel-electric ITR primary shredder and an ARP screw conveyor line. Whole OTR tyres are downsized on site, loaded into walking-floor trailers and railed to a coastal pyrolysis plant, eliminating costly Class-1 landfill and substituting lower-carbon recovered oil for bunker fuel at the port.

• Integrated advanced-recycling facility – An urban industrial precinct west of Melbourne installs the first commercial continuous-devulcanisation reactor in Australia. Hard Recycle supplies the front-end shredding, screening, steel removal and AZO dosing system, ensuring that a 14-per-cent ash, wire-free feedstock hits the reactor, maximising recovered-carbon-black purity and plant uptime.

Meeting Policy and Market Shifts Head-On

Mandatory stewardship will force tyre importers and retailers to fund higher-value processing, but infrastructure must exist before levies can do their job. Hard Recycle’s modular equipment catalogue allows staged investment: start with mobile downsizing to cut freight, then bolt on granulation, steel cleaning, fine screening and finally bulk-handling silos as end-markets mature. This agility aligns capital expenditure with real gate-fee revenues and avoids the sunk-cost traps that previously plagued the sector.

A Practical Way Forward

Australia is not short of used tyres; it is short of local plants that turn them into reusable materials. Closing that gap demands trustworthy machinery, engineered integration and support that extends well beyond delivery of shiny new equipment. Hard Recycle knits together proven European technologies – ITR and MLS Makina for shredding, Zemmler for precision grading, Tecnofer for downstream clean-up, ARP for conveying, Lanner for steel recovery, AZO for bulk handling and OMAR for dust control – into turnkey systems sized for Australian realities.

Whether the goal is to keep crumb rubber on-shore for modified-bitumen roads, to feed emerging pyrolysis ventures with specification-grade chip, or simply to stop burying haul-truck tyres in mine voids, Hard Recycle offers a complete pathway from first feasibility study to long-term maintenance. That is how a promising 66-per-cent recovery rate can be transformed into genuine circularity – tyre after tyre, tonne after tonne, year after year.