ISRI Convention: Tire Recycling Moves into Gear in China

As with all other secondary commodities, manufacturers in China have taken notice of the raw materials stream that can be harvested by recycling tires.

In a session at the ISRI (Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc.) 2008 Annual Convention, Dr. Nai-xiu Ding of China’s Qingdao University of Science and Technology provided a statistical analysis of tire recycling in that nation.

She indicated that approximately 60 percent of end-of-life tires are currently recycled in China, with end markets including tire re-treading, tire-derived fuel (TDF), tire shreds used in civil engineering applications and crumb rubber used in manufactured products.

The Chinese government has set ambitious recycling goals, according to Ding, including the production of 75 million re-tread tires annually; 6.8 million tons of reclaimed rubber products made annually; and 3.1 million tons of crumb rubber.

These goals will be achievable after the “perfect establishment of the collection system for scrap tire recovery all over China,” according to Dr. Ding.

Much of China’s current tire recycling activity is centered in the tire-making region of Shandong province.

Currently, Chinese industry is consuming the scrap tire commodities that have been created domestically, but for the most part is not seeking crumb rubber or shreds from outside its own borders.

Pete Grogan of Weyerhaeuser Recycling, Federal Way, Wash., let attendees of the tire recycling session know, however, that demand for a commodity from China can occur quickly and in a major way.

In his presentation, Grogan noted that global paper production has grown from 245 million metric tons in 1990 to a projected level of nearly 500 million tons in 2014, thanks almost entirely to growth in Asia.

“China is like a new sun in the recycling solar system—it will consume 20 percent of the world’s recovered paper by 2020,” said Grogan. Recyclers in the United States have benefited, as “the U.S. is historically the Saudi Arabia of recovered paper,” he remarked.

There is no guarantee that Chinese manufacturers will begin requesting container loads of crumb rubber from the United States, but then again very few people in the early 1990s would have foreseen its endless demand for containers filled with scrap paper.

The ISRI 2008 Annual Convention took place April 7-10 at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas.