Whole tyres haven't gone to UK landfill for years, so old tyres are recycled or recovered instead. A worn tyre has plenty of life left as a raw material, and the UK has a well-established system for turning it into useful products. When we fit new tyres, your old ones go into that system rather than to waste.
No more landfill
Sending whole tyres to landfill has long been banned in the UK on environmental grounds, and shredded tyres followed. That's driven a recycling and recovery industry that handles the millions of tyres replaced each year, keeping them out of the ground and putting the material back to use. Responsible disposal is part of any proper tyre-fitting service.
What old tyres become
An old tyre can take several routes depending on its condition:
- Reuse as a part-worn, where it legally meets the standard (though many don't).
- Retreading, common for truck and bus tyres, where a new tread is bonded to a sound casing.
- Crumb rubber, shredded and ground for sports pitches, playground surfaces, roads and new products.
- Energy recovery, where suitable tyres are used as fuel in cement kilns and similar.
The recycling process
Tyres collected from fitters are sorted by condition. Sound casings may be retreaded; the rest are typically shredded and separated into rubber, steel and fibre. The rubber is ground into crumb of various sizes for different uses, the steel is recycled as metal, and the fibre is recovered too. Very little is wasted, which is the point of the system.
What happens to your old tyres
When a fitter replaces your tyres, they take the old ones away, and a small disposal charge is usually part of the fitted price. They're then collected by a licensed waste carrier and sent for recycling or recovery, so you don't have to think about it, see eco and sustainable tyres for the wider picture.
We recycle responsibly
We take your old tyres away for proper recycling whenever we fit new ones, across the UK. Book a fit.
