Tyres are produced at 250 million units in Europe each year that is to say more than 2 600 000 tonnes accounting for more than €14.000 M. Some are collected by the garages, the others are included is the end-of-life vehicles (ELV).
Their lifetime is in a medium range, roughly several years.
Tyres put together all the handicaps of rubbers:
* 3 D network resulting of vulcanisation
* Incompatible reinforcements strongly linked to rubber
* Non-biodegradability.
* Consequently tyre recycling is difficult and expensive and depends on the will of countries.
The main ways are:
* Retreading
* Geotechnical applications
* Energy recovery
* Additives for other materials after size reduction.
Landfilling is not a recycling way because of the non-degradability.
Figure 1 displays the market shares of the various rubbers for tyre industry:
* Two commodity and one engineering rubbers, NR, SBR and BR are highly predominant
* One engineering rubber, butyl and its derivates (IIR, BIIR, CIIR) are fairly used.