Re-Tyre Ltd, in Unit 5, Sherrington Way, off Lister Road, uses a unique, patented process with bespoke machinery to strip down the tyres, remove all metal, powder down the rubber, and with high-pressure water and heat, turn them into new, road-legal tyres.
Former marine engineer in the Royal Navy, Ken Jones, originally from Shrewsbury, is the secretary of the company and has ambitions to take Re-Tyre further than just Basingstoke.
He said: “When you take the tyre off your car, the tyre fitters will actually pay me £5 to take it away. And yet there’s still £50 worth of rubber in there.
‘The tyre fitters will actually pay me £5 to take it away. And yet there’s still £50 worth of rubber in there’ (Image: Newsquest)
“As a recycling operation, it’s not very exciting, but, because we do it in a very different way to anybody else, what we end up with is a powder that can go back into manufacturing new tyres – and that’s something nobody else can do.
“I started on this process in 2008. I was working with a research fellow at Imperial College, I’d been tasked with designing a pyrolysis process.”
Mr Jones explained that pyrolysis heats up rubber tyres in a reduced oxygen environment and because there is no oxygen, the tyre doesn’t burn. It starts to break down. This is called thermal decomposition.
Some of the bespoke machinery (Image: Newsquest)
He added: “To date, it’s never really been truly successful, but people keep chasing it as a big dream. We set up a four-year project to break down the rubber, take the steel out, and prepare it to go through a pyrolysis process, and then we developed a pyrolysis chamber using microwaves.
“The end objective was met. We did manage to pyrolyse rubber and everybody thought it was wonderful, but eventually nobody took the project on commercially, and it just died a death.
“Once they’d abandoned it, I picked it up and started to redevelop it again.”
An example of the powdered-down rubber (Image: Newsquest)
Mr Jones explained that he believes his business has the potential to expand its operations further afield, and believes Re-Tyre can eliminate all scrap tyres in the UK and prevent illegal tyre scrapping abroad.
He said: “The intention is to set up another three to five units locally. I’m talking about Reading, Maidenhead, Southampton, somewhere within about a 50 to 60-mile radius of Basingstoke with the idea that each unit has a 15-mile radius for collecting tyres.
“The eventual target is 300 units all the way across the UK so that there are no scrap tyres anymore in the UK.”