Laboratory tests have already been conducted on the oil created from Green Distillation Technologies tyre recycling process. That process breaks old tyres into oil, carbon and steel.

The “on-truck” tests have been conducted on a Kenworth K200 semi-trailer that travelled the 1200km from Brisbane to the Rio Tinto Hail Creek mine, south of Mackay, Queensland.

The truck was fuelled with a mixture of 10% recycled tyre oil and standard diesel for the outward leg and 100% diesel for the return journey.

Results from that trial should be available next week.

That trial will be followed by one using a Hyundai 2017 iLoad, which has a 2.5 litre diesel engine, which is similar to many other diesel vehicles on the market.

That van will transport the team from the Queensland University of Technology and Deakin University that is conducting the research to and from mine, following a similar methodology to the Kenworth test.

The purpose of this research is to compensate for what has become known as the “Volkswagen factor” as the previous research was done on a laboratory bench.

That bench testing by QUT found the recycled tyre oil, when mixed with standard diesel, had exhaust emissions with 30% less nitrogen dioxide but almost the same performance.

GDT’s tyre recycling process is known as “destructive distillation”.

It recycles end-of-life tyres into oil, carbon and the steel bead and mesh, leaving nothing wasted and even uses some of the recovered oil as the heat source.

The company is building a plant in Perth, Western Australia, to recycle mining-sized tyres.

GDT chief operating officer Trevor Bayley said the company had already worked out the logistics efficiently and economically recycling oversize tyres that weighed four tonnes.

“The benefits of recycling oversized tyres are considerable as a tyre that weighs 4t will yield 1500 litres of oil, 1.5t of carbon as well as the steel reinforcing, which can go back to the tyre manufacturer for reuse,” he said.

“The last Hyder report in 2013-14 estimated that there are 155,000t of off the road end-of-life tyres of various sizes generated in Australia each year of which 79.4% are left on site as currently there is no economic and green method of recycling them.

“In addition there are 1.5 billion tonnes of tyres discarded tyres a year by 2020 and the US more than 200 million.”

The road test research is being conducted by the Biofuel Engine Research Facility at QUT under the supervision of Professor Richard Brown in association with Melbourne’s Deakin University’s Dr Tim Bodisco.

Brown said the on-road truck test would be able to confirm the basic laboratory tests.

“We have been asked why we are adding 10% of recycled tyre oil to the diesel and not using 100% tyre oil as the fuel we are testing,” he said.

“The answer is that diesel engines in Australia are designed to run on diesel fuel that is refined to a particular standard, while the tyre oil is an unrefined crude oil,” he said.