World-first tyre recycling technology developed by Green Distillation Technologies is on display as part of the Innovation Wall at the Recycling Discovery Hub which has opened at the Materials Recycling Facility at 1 Recycling Road, Hume, ACT.
The display is part of a showcase of new technology solutions and shows a section of tyre, examples of the oil, carbon and steel that are created as a result of the GDT destructive distillation process.
The Innovation Wall exhibition is permanent and allows school and community groups to receive tailored education programs and understand waste and recycling activities that are undertaken in the ACT.
GDT has recently announced that they plan to open a tyre recycling facility in Toowoomba that they anticipate will commence operations in September next year and have operated a test plant at Warren, New South Wales since 2009.
Their ‘destructive distillation’ process recycles each tyre into oil, carbon and steel. The oil can be used as a heating fuel, direct into stationary diesel engines or is capable of further refinement into automotive or aviation jet fuel and other oil derived products.
The oil from the recycled tyres is described as a light crude which is easy to refine while the carbon is a high-grade product that has massive world-wide potential for sale as carbon, in the form of carbon black, and is one of the world’s most widely used ingredients in many products ranging from tyres, plastics and paints, water filtration, printers ink, paint, electrodes, graphene, toothpaste and cosmetics including eyeliner, mascara, nail polish, eye shadow, blushes, rouge and lipstick.
And the steel reinforcing mesh and beading of the tyre can be fully recycled or returned directly to the tyre manufacturers for reuse in new tyres.
The volume of valuable recyclable material produced by the process is impressive and a typical 10 kg car tyre will yield 4 litres of oil, 4kg of carbon, 2kg of steel, a 70kg truck tyre will provide 27 litres of oil, 28 kg of carbon, 15 kg of steel and 4 tonne oversize mining dump truck tyre will yield 1.6 tonnes of carbon, 0.8 tonne of steel and 1500 litres of oil.
Green Distillation Technologies Chief Operating Officer Trevor Bayley said: “There are 1.5 billion tyres discarded globally each year with Australia generating around 25 million disused tyres a year while the USA currently discards more than 250 million old tyres.
“Grinding the tyres into crumbs is not a solution as there is only so much that can be used in playgrounds and on sporting fields and regrettably the greatest proportion finishes up as furnace fuel, which is a waste of such a valuable raw material as well as creating noxious greenhouse gas emissions.
“We believe that in the future the GDT process will become the standard means of disposing of old tyres in an environmentally friendly way, which is consistent with the growing trend towards achieving a circular economy,” Mr Bayley said.
About Green Distillation Technologies Corporation: GDT is an Australian company which has developed world-first technology to recycle end-of-life car and truck and oversize tyres into carbon, oil and steel.
Released for Green Distillation Technologies by Dennis Rutzou Public Relations (www.drpr.com.au)