The Tyre Recovery Association (TRA) is calling on the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) to place a moratorium on waste exemptions for end-of-life tyres over fears of malpractice.

Waste sites wishing to treat small amounts of end-of-life tyres (around 50 tonnes of tyres over a seven-day period) – by means of baling, shredding, peeling, shaving or granulating (to ‘ensure they can be recovered’) – can register for an environmental permit exemption.

According to the Environment Agency (EA), the exemptions are meant to increase the recovery of waste tyres (as they reduce the administrative burden on waste sites).

However, the TRA is warning ministers that the increasing numbers of waste sites registering for exemption are a ‘looming threat to the environment’, as they are often not policed.

The body points to recent EA figures that show that in December 2013, 1,622 exempt sites were registered for the treatment of tyres and 3,912 sites registered for the storage of baled tyres in England and Wales.

It outlines that if all the registered exempt storage sites were stocking the maximum amount of waste tyres, it could equate to around 40 per cent of total UK national waste tyre arisings (approximately 195,000 tonnes) coming from ‘sites [that] are subject to relatively few regulatory checks’.

As such, it is calling on government to review the exemption policy and call for a ‘moratorium on the issuing of any further new exemptions until this review has been carried out’.

Continuing calls for review of exemptions

The call backs similar ones made to ministers 2012 and 2013. Two years ago, the TRA wrote to then-Waste Minister Lord Taylor of Holbeach expressing its concern, but was told that exemptions where granted were for ‘small-scale, low-risk operations in order to encourage bona fide recycling and recovery’.

In 2013, the TRA wrote again to Defra, expressing concerns over malpractice at exempt sites, and challenging the assertion that exemptions were ‘low risk’. It highlighted that ‘almost all of the high-profile enforcement action carried out by Environment Agency officials related to sites covered by the exemptions regime’.

In order to ensure waste tyres are reuse or recycled in compliance with UK and EU law, the TRA supports the voluntary recovery programme, the Tyre Industry Federation Responsible Recycler Scheme. Under the scheme, members are subject to regular spot audit and must track all used tyres that are collected, handled or reprocessed throughout the disposal chain to ‘deliver full traceability and accountability’.

Find out more about the TRA or the Tyre Industry Federation Responsible Recycler Scheme.