One of them has even won a bronze medal in the Edison Awards, the world’s top prize for innovation, for its tyre diesel, carbon and steel producing tyre recycling process. The other is repurposing the rubber from the tyres for use as matting for playgrounds and its own tyre derived fuel.
Green Distillation Technologies Corporation was Australia’s first ever finalist in the awards and collected its medal at the awards ceremony in New York in late April.
The company developed a technology that turns discarded tyres into three saleable products – a 90% pure carbon, a number two diesel and steel.
If it can make it stack up, GDTC should have a pretty sweet business on its hands. It will essentially get paid to take the tyres away and paid for the products it can derive from them and there should be little, if any, waste products left over.
The technology can be used for up to super single size tyres – the type of rubber cladding the wheels of buses and B-Double trucks.
Theoretically it should be possible to process large off the road tyres – the sort that go on haul trucks – too.
The main challenge seems to be logistical.
The distillation process takes place in a 15m tall tower so lifting the 4t or so of tyre up to that height will take some doing. Those super single tyres – which are about 2m in diameter – weigh about 70kg.
Then there is the problem of what to do with all the oil and carbon that will be produced from such a large tyre.
GDTC chief operating officer Trevor Bayley estimated a large OTR tyre would put out about 1500 litres of oil and 1.6t of carbon.
He said the company was looking for a mining company to partner with to extend its technology to cover mining-sized tyres.
“It would cost about $2-2.5 million to do the research and development on it,” Bayley said.
“If there is a mining company that has a particular issue and is prepared to pay 50% of that we’ll get to work.”
The secret behind GDTC’s process is a technique called destructive distillation – yes, its people are trying to find a more marketing-friendly term for it.
That process breaks the tyre down to the molecular level.
At the end there is the diesel, the carbon and the steel belting.
Apparently the steel belting comes out of the process looking shiny and new. It is sold back to the tyre makers for reuse.
“We have a commitment from a trading company in Japan to take all the steel we can deliver,” Bayley said.
The diesel does not have the lubricity to be used in mobile machines but it can be used in stationery diesel engines such as generators.
The company has looked at further refining the fuel.
In fact, it has entered into a three-year arrangement with the University of New South Wales to look at other ways to get value from the carbon and oil products it produces.
The problem will be thrown to UNSW PhD students.
The other benefit of the process is that it is largely energy self-sufficient.
“Whatever heat we put in, we get back out,” Bayley said.
Heat has to be applied but the process is exothermic once it starts so it is pretty much self-sustaining.
It is not the sort of process a company would want to be switching off and back on again though.
Another area of R&D is into mining conveyor belts.
Bayley said Tasmania was one state looking for solutions for its mining waste.
He said the state was not allowed to “export” its mining waste – or any other waste for that matter – to the mainland.
Therefore Tasmanian miners have a growing problem in terms of discarded mining tyres and conveyor belts.
Tyrecycle is another company tackling the Tasmanian mining tyre waste problem.
MMG is one of the businesses making use of Tyrecycle’s remote resource recovery service.
Rosebery general manager Aaron Brannigan said the remoteness of the mine, 300km northwest of Hobart and 125km south of Burnie in Tasmania, created unique challenges.
He said 220t of OTR waste had been safely removed from site since October 2013.
From the waste it collects across Australia, Tyrecycle produces a rubber crumb and tyre derived fuel using what it says is an environmentally sound process of remanufacturing.
Tyrecycle, which is part of the ResourceCo Group, recovers about 85% of the rubber needed to make a new tyre and 95% of the steel needed to make a new tyre.
Its products are used nationally in the development of sporting surfaces, playgrounds, road surfacing, adhesives, brake pads and as fuel.
Tyrecycle CEO Jim Fairweather said the company’s model of collecting and repurposing rubber waste was giving mines a simple and environmentally sustainable answer to a growing challenge.
“Securing a safe, commercial solution for the large volumes of used rubber materials has always been difficult for Australia’s mining sector, as the cost of disposal, processing and the sheer volume of waste rubber created, increases over time,” he said.
“We can recover and recycle rubber materials from anywhere in Australia, including some of the nation’s largest and most remote mining sites.
“Our capabilities have been further enhanced by the commissioning of a mobile shredder, which will reduce the transportation costs and challenges associated with such large waste streams.”
Each year the company collects more than 120,000t of end of life tyres, conveyor belts and off-the-road material from sites across Australia.
The material is then turned into recycled rubber and reused in domestic construction, manufacturing and automotive industries.
Fairweather said the company was continually evolving and finding new ways to use its waste material and reach its goal of reducing the number of tyres entering landfill to zero.
“It’s about driving better environmental outcomes, while at the same time addressing the concerning safety issues associated with stockpiling of waste,” he said.
“There are plenty of examples of rubber waste as both a fire hazard and a breeding ground for disease through mosquitos and that has a flow-on effect for both vegetation and wildlife.”
