Tyrecycle opens East Rockingham tyre recycling facility

East Rockingham capacity

Tyrecycle has opened its tyre recycling facility in East Rockingham, 40 kilometres south of Perth. Reece Whitby and Madeline King attended the opening. The approximately A$15 million project expands the company’s Western Australian processing operations.

The plant’s annual capacities cover two different stages:

• 42,000 tonnes of tyres processed;
• 7,000 tonnes of rubber crumb produced.

The project’s funding includes A$5.2 million in state and federal support through the Recycling Modernisation Fund and A$9.6 million from Tyrecycle. Rubber crumb is intended for Western Australian roads, alongside separate tyre-derived-fuel markets overseas.

The facility handles passenger and commercial tyres and is intended to provide secondary processing for planned Port Hedland mining-tyre operations.

Commissioning and product markets

The East Rockingham project completed cold commissioning in late 2023. Before the opening, Tyrecycle had scheduled commissioning for March 2024 while preparing to move from its O’Connor plant.

Tyrecycle has signed five-year offtake agreements with Daicel and Nippon Paper. Chief executive Jim Fairweather connected the plant’s flexible product specifications with access to Japanese customers, alongside opportunities to supply the Western Australian market.

Fuel specifications and mining-tyre processing

Paper-industry customers require steel-free, 1.5-inch tyre-derived fuel for power boilers. Cement customers in Japan require two-inch fuel containing steel, which also supplies raw material to their kilns. These customer specifications concern fuel products, distinct from the rubber crumb intended for road applications.

The planned Port Hedland operation would reduce off-the-road mining tyres to dense chunks weighing about 60 kilograms. Those chunks would travel to Perth for further processing. Fairweather envisaged using trucks returning from deliveries to the Pilbara.

Earlier equipment investment at Erskine Park

Tyrecycle opened its Erskine Park facility in New South Wales on December 6, 2021, with ELDAN machinery. At that site, A$2.9 million in funding supported an A$5.8 million expansion project involving off-the-road tyres and steel-cleaning equipment.

The planned work included reducing tyre-derived-fuel size from six inches to 1.5 inches, adding steel cleaning and introducing mining-tyre processing and bead removal. The project targeted diversion of up to 3,200 tonnes of waste mining tyres annually from on-site disposal, landfill or overseas exports, with crumbed products intended for roads and manufactured rubber products.