With decades of experience behind it, Eldan Recycling is helping Australian recyclers change the landscape for waste tyres.
Of the 245,000 tonnes of off the road (OTR) tyres that reach end of life in Australia each year, about 10 per cent are recycled, according to Tyre Stewardship Australia.
There’s an increasing industry appetite to improve those statistics as Australia transitions to a circular economy.
One of the key prerequisites to making sure tyres are recycled, reused, or disposed of correctly is ensuring they can be broken down. Their composition – vulcanised rubber, steel and fibre – makes separation difficult.
Recycling OTR tyres pose more challenges due to their size, weight, and location in remote areas – just one tyre can weigh more than 600 kilograms and be up to four metres high.
Danish-based company Eldan Recycling has almost 70 years’ experience supplying recycling solutions worldwide. More than 1200 complete systems and 8100 individual machines installed globally provide recycling solutions for tyres, cables, e-waste, aluminium scrap, fridges, municipal solid waste (MSW), and more.
Carsten Nielsen, Pacific Area Sales Manager for Eldan, has been part of a recent project to help an Australian-based customer break down OTR tyres, collaborating with an Italian company to help the client achieve its rubber reduction requirements.
“The Italian company did the pre-cutting,” Carsten says. “Even that is quite a big chunk – we’re talking about 100 to 150-kilogram pieces. After the Italian company has done the pre-cutting, our equipment chops it down into even smaller pieces.”
The key, Carsten says, is to make sure that the tyre waste is small enough to be used and resold, and in some cases, exported as tyre derived fuel (TDF).
“It can only be 150 millimetres or less. Exporting anything bigger than that is illegal under Australia’s waste export rules.”
The plant is just one of several across Australia currently using Eldan Recycling equipment, including several lines in New South Wales and one in Western Australia.
The new Western Australia facility was commissioned in November 2024, and has since produced its first 600 kilograms of rubber granules.
Carsten says Eldan worked with the client to ensure everything was in place and find solutions for several challenges, including a small footprint and where to store tyres before processing to meet Environment Protection Authority requirements.
The decision also had to be made as to how far down the tyres were shredded.
“Do we produce granules, TDF, or do we produce powder?” Carsten says. “Luckily for Eldan, they wanted to do it all, including going all the way down to powder that is used mainly for road construction. We’re doing everything.”
An MT-Rex cutter initially cuts the tyres into manageable sizes before they are fed into the Eldan Recycling line. The line can process about eight tonnes an hour of OTR tyres, and about 10-15 tonnes an hour of car tyres.
It’s not just rubber that Eldan equipment can recover. Steel in tyres can have high value depending on how it is extracted.
“Steel is quite a valuable product, because you can get anywhere between $200 to $300 a tonne if it’s cleaned correctly,” Carsten says.
“With our system, the purity of the steel is up about 98 per cent compared with 90 to 92 per cent, maybe less, from other systems. And for that product you might get between $20 to $50 a tonne due to the amount of carbon dioxide that will be produced. Our system allows clients to expand and clean the steel.”
Explaining how the system works, Carsten says the steel is cut up with the rest of the tyre in pre-chopping, a device called a rasper then cuts it down to a certain size. When the tyres are cut, it has the effect of liberating the steel from the rubber.
“The steel might have a little bit of rubber attached to it when it comes out of the raspers,” Carsten says.
“For example, let’s assume we have a 20-millimetre screen in the rasper – the material falls through; some of the rubber comes out with the steel attached, and some comes out clean and will be picked up by a magnet next to a screener where you are bouncing the rubber and the steel.”
Any steel that is free of rubber will fall through a screen and go out on a vibratory outlet. An air stream will remove the textile (another component of the tyre), the rest is a mixture of rubber and steel.
“You have a double drum magnet that picks out the steel and the rubber will fall through,” Carsten says. “But as you’re picking up the steel to a magnet, you might have some rubber between the magnet and the steel. So, you go to a secondary drum magnet where the steel is airborne because of the magnetic field. The rubber will fall in between those two magnets.”
Once the initial cycle is completed, any rubber and steel on the top layer of the screener is put back into the rasper to have one more rerun.
Carsten says it’s the system’s combination of screening, blowing and its double drum magnet that makes the product so clean.
“You’re not throwing away any rubber and you have a clean steel,” he says.
Eldan Recycling is hands-on in all aspects of building a line that is fit for purpose for clients.
“Almost all of it is being designed and built in-house. With that being said, we are not producing the conveyors and the small stuff. We buy that from a sub supplier, who has been supplying us with belt conveyors for 20 years.”
But it’s not just the equipment and output that sets Eldan apart. Carsten says the value of strong back-up service should never be under-estimated.
“One of the reasons why we convinced our tyre client to buy from us is that we answer all their queries straight away,” he says. “They are working with salespeople who know their stuff. My background is as a supervisor for installs when I was younger, and I’ve been working with the technical aspects all my life. We have machines I installed in Australia almost 20 years ago that are still running strong, even after the line was relocated to another factory. Our products and our team get the job done.”
For more information, visit:
www.eldan-recycling.com
