After months of investigation and discussion, the BBC has finally produced its File on 4 investigation into what happens to the UK’s waste tyres
Listen now on BBC Sounds – or on BBC Radio 4 at 20:00 GMT on Tuesday 24 March and at 11:00 GMT on Wednesday 25 March – the programme is available for up to a year from the publication date.
If you are concerned about this issue , you can write to your MP, and quite a few recyclers are doing so. However, it has to be the MP for the constituency in which you live, not your business constituency if that is different.
For the most part, everyone in the tyre recycling sector knows what happens, but this takes the story to a wider audience. That wider audience can help increase pressure on DeFRA and the EA to act. Listeners will smile at Eddie, the tyre fitter, claiming that he had no idea what happened to the tyres he charged his customers £3 per tyre to dispose of. Pity they didn’t explain how much the rogue operators were charging to take the tyres away.
It is to their shame that DeFRA and the EA gave standard responses that essentially ignored the evidence presented to them. Plus ça change!
The derisory responses to questions by the T8 operator in Rochdale ( You can easily identify who this is with a quick search), exemplifies the problem, – everyone is doing it, so why not us? Tyre and Rubber Recycling was party to directing the investigating team to the T8 issues and it was refreshing to see that they did focus on the T8 abuse as part of the problem. Waste is a huge problem in the UK, not just tyre waste but plastics, household waste, paper waste etc. It is almost as if the Department responsible for waste was not fit for purpose – the reality is that DeFRA and the Environment Agency do not have the capacity to properly oversee waste management in the UK. This is evidenced by the reality of unmanageable household landfills, unrecycled exported plastics, and illegally treated waste tyre exports.
There is a theory that since the UK no longer has huge waste tyre piles, that there is no problem. Therefore, nothing needs doing. Another theory is that DeFRA and the EA are absolutely aware of what is going on but have refused to act, or have held back acting because a ban on the export of whole waste tyres, or a ban on the export of waste tyres to India would result in an environmental disaster in the UK as we do not have the capacity, not the markets to treat the waste tyre arisings domestically.
Below are a couple of links that readers may find interesting. The first is all over Youtube, the second has been used by the TRA to highlight the problem, and has been sent to the EA and DeFRA.
There is another video, which we would like to link to showing a UK operator knowingly baling and shipping to India for pyrolysis and boasting about it -we have held back on that link for legal reasons.
