Jeff Elliot, a California-based technical industry writer with over 20 years of experience, explains how the UK tyre reprocessing industry is evolving to meet new challenges.
For UK tyre recyclers processing enough volume, investing in a large, high-torque shredder may make sense. However, many operations do not process enough tyres to justify that level of investment. Even recyclers that already own smaller or mid-sized shredders can still run into problems when larger truck and OTR tyres enter the mix.
OTR, or off-the-road, tyres are the larger, heavier tyres used on construction, mining, earthmoving, and agricultural equipment. The sizes vary tremendously, but the recycling problem becomes fairly obvious once one is sitting in front of a shredder. There is considerably more tyre to deal with, and some of the internal reinforcing components are extremely substantial.
One of those components is the bead wire. The bead is the reinforced ring around the inside diameter of the tyre that locks it against the wheel rim. Embedded in the rubber are bundles of high-strength steel wire.
During normal service, that steel is essential because it keeps the tyre seated securely on the rim. At the end of the tyre’s useful life, however, that same extremely strong steel becomes something a recycler has to cut through. And cutting through bead wire repeatedly with a shredder is not necessarily desirable.
A common assumption with larger tyres is that the answer is simply more shredder: a larger cutting chamber, more horsepower, more torque. Although that can work, putting an entire tyre through a shredder means it must deal with everything in that tyre, including the bead. In larger truck and OTR tyres, the bead can contain an extremely heavy concentration of high-tensile steel approximately 16 to 19 mm (5/8 to 3/4 in) thick.
“The issue is not whether a sufficiently large shredder can cut it – it can. The question is whether it makes economic sense to repeatedly force shredder knives through that material when the bead can be removed first,” says John Neuens of BCA Industries, a manufacturer of industrial shredding and recycling equipment.
That is the basic idea behind BCA Industries’ SWC100 Sidewall Remover. The machine cuts both sidewalls, including the bead area, from the tyre before the remaining tread reaches the shredder. A newly introduced tread cutter attachment then allows operators to take what is left and cut the remaining tread into smaller sections for shredding, transport, or disposal.
How the SWC100 Works
The SWC100 is an all-hydraulic machine with an automatic tyre lift. Instead of manually wrestling a large tyre into position, the lift raises it into the machine, where both sidewalls are cut during the same loading cycle. This eliminates the need to cut one sidewall, flip the tyre, and then cut the other.
BCA offers the SWC100 in both a portable petrol-powered model and a stationary electric model. The tread cutter bolts directly onto either version and ties into the machine’s existing hydraulic and control system. It can be ordered with the machine or added later by an existing customer.
BCA estimates the SWC100 can process approximately one tyre every 35 seconds, with an operating range from car tyres as small as approximately 430 mm (17 in) to HGV tyres up to approximately 1,120 mm (44 in).
After removing the sidewalls, the operator moves the remaining tread to the cutter. The tread cutter bolts onto the existing SWC100 frame and uses the machine’s existing hydraulic and control system. The cutter uses a specialised saw-type cutting system, and both sets of cutting components can be sharpened while still installed on the machine.
Safety is addressed through a two-hand operating requirement, so the tread cutter only operates when both of the operator’s hands are in the required push position.
“If the tread is being transported elsewhere for final processing, a single cut opens the donut so it can lie flatter and stack more efficiently. Or it can be cut multiple times to the desired final size,” explains Neuens.
There is another benefit to removing the sidewalls first. Removing them before shredding also separates the sidewalls from the tread for handling as a separate material stream.
For UK tyre recyclers, the real value of the sidewall cutter and tread cutter is in changing what goes into the shredder. Instead of feeding an entire truck or OTR tyre into the shredder, the sidewalls and heavily reinforced bead can be removed first. The remaining tread can then be cut into smaller sections before it reaches the shredder.
For recyclers already operating smaller or mid-sized shredders, that can be significant. The shredder is still doing the shredding, but it is receiving material that has already had one of the more difficult components removed and has been reduced to a size it can more readily process.
For UK recyclers, the sidewall remover and tread cutter can simply serve as the first processing steps, with shredding and downstream material handling to follow as needed.
BCA’s PD1000 and PD1000 IO provide options after that pre-processing. The PD1000 is a portable, dual-shaft, low-speed, high-torque shredder that can process HGV tread after the sidewalls are removed, while the PD1000 IO adds material handling to the process.
For UK operations processing car, HGV and super-single tyres, the PD2000 provides another solution, taking the material through whole-tyre-to-TDF processing.
