Tyre recycling: Making the wheel go round
The European Union plans to:
- ban the use of rubber infill materials in artificial turf pitches, which represents an average of 30 % of end-markets
- further restrict the content of PAHs and other chemicals impacting the remaining 70 % of the market.
Against this 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 the 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.
EuRIC invites you to join the 8th edition of their Recyclers’ Talks series fully dedicated to tyre recycling in Brussels on 18 April 2023 in order to discuss with top-level policy-makers and experts how to boost the circularity of tyres alongside the value chain.