Life Cycle Assessment of Agriculture and Mining Off-the-Road (OTR) Tyres

Tyre Stewardship Australia and Edge Impact

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Tyre Stewardship Australia

Abstract

End-of-life (EOL) off-the-road (OTR) tyres have much lower recycling and recovery rates in Australia, compared to other EOL tyres. This is due to additional barriers, such as difficulties in handling and transporting OTR tyres, lack of recovery services, and priorities of different parties involved. Furthermore, the environmental benefits from recovering OTR tyre are less researched and unclear. In a previously commissioned report, Life Cycle Assessment of End-of-Life Tyres (TSA 2024), TSA investigated the environmental benefits of a range of tyre-derived products (TDPs) manufactured from passenger and truck tyres. However, as the recovery of OTR tyres has different handling and logistics requirements than passenger and truck tyres, the results from this study cannot be directly applied to the recovery of OTR tyres. EOL OTR tyres from mining and agriculture also tend to be further away from tyre recycling facilities than passenger and truck tyres. This study looks at different recovery pathways of OTR tyres through the lens of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to determine the differences in environmental impacts and to see how the results compare with the previous report on passenger and truck tyres. Figure 1 shows a proposed LCA for an end-of-life tyre, considering the impacts from the collection of the tyre, processing to TDPs and subsequent end-markets, use and end-of-life. The data in this research report considers the unique aspects of the collection and processing stages, specifically for OTR tyres.

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