Fuel plan for old treads

EACH year about four million tyres are discarded in New Zealand.
They are sent to farms and landfills, or simply dumped down gullies and piled on the side of the road.
Over time, the tyres that are no longer fit for a vehicle have become an environmental nightmare - or put more bluntly, a sore on the landscape.
No one, really, has taken full responsibility for disposing of the  worn-out tyres in this country. Under the Basel Convention, limiting movements of hazardous waste between nations, the disused tyres cannot be exported.
Nearly 600,000 tyres, for instance, were dumped on a Land Information New Zealand property at Napier four years ago, and the remaining half of them are now being removed because of the fire risk.
Many of the tyres are just being re-located to another site in Kerepehi near Ngatea with the intention of using them for retaining walls.
Enter Owen Douglas, an ex-Waikato farmer now living in Tauranga. Through his company Carbon Recovery, he is about to import a $1 million tyre shredding machine from Columbus McKinnon Corporation, based in Sarasota, Florida.
Mr Douglas will be leasing an old dairy company shed at the Waharoa Industrial Park to house the machine.
At one fell swoop, he will be able to handle all four million of the country's discarded tyres each year. Suddenly, those tyre piles, and the landscape, will be cleaned up.
The tyres, all sizes from a car's to an excavator's, will be shredded into  10.16cm rubber chips and sent to South Korea as tyre-derived fuel (TDF) for an Asia Cement Co plant 150km inland from Seoul.
Over the past decade, a determined Mr Douglas has attended and spoken at conferences in the United States, talked to experts in Japan, Italy, Canada and South America, approached coal-fired boiler operators in New Zealand and the two big tyre manufacturers - Dunlop including Goodyear, and Bridgestone which owns Firestone.
Burning the tyres for fuel is commonplace overseas, and Mr Douglas became more and more convinced that this was the answer for New Zealand.
The tyre chips can be mixed with coal, wood waste or gas in a 10/90 per cent ratio and used as fuel for concrete kilns, power plants or paper mills. TDF is hotter than coal and produces more energy, but there is debate over its toxin production.
Some people will say that burning tyres is low on the hierarchy of reducing waste than recycling, but it is better than sending the tyres to a landfill or dump. There, the pile can harbour the possibility of fires or diseases delivered by mice and mosquitoes.
So here's the rub, delivered by a modest but inquiring Mr Douglas. "The lime in the cement plants absorb everything and reduce the emissions. A tyre contains 25 per cent steel and when it goes through a cement plant it oxidises and becomes powder - that's a benefit.
"One tonne of tyre chips (TDF) is equivalent to 1.6 tonnes of coal to power a cement plant, reducing costs," he said.
After a decade of research and development, Mr Douglas found a solution with the South Koreans.
It all started 12 years ago when Mr Douglas became involved in selling fly ash, the residue from the coal-fired boiler at the NZ Dairy Co in Te Awamatu.
He went to a cement industry conference in Las Vegas to learn more about marketing fly ash and ended up hearing about the process of burning tyres for fuel.
Back home, he interested the NZ Dairy Company into processing tyres at its coal-fired Waitoa factory but the initiative never got started as a result of the Fonterra restructuring.
Undaunted, Mr Douglas visited Coalcorp, Genesis Power, Golden Bay Cement, Holcim Cement, Pan Pacific and Kinleith Pulp and Paper Mill, but for one reason and another they decided not to use their boilers for burning tyres.
Kinleith came the closest, saying he could use the Whakatane Pulp and Paper mill but an environmental officer decided it wasn't a good idea.
Mr Douglas had spent six years reaching this point, and after further visits to the United States, Columbus McKinnon suggested he visit Asia Cement.
"I went to South Korea four years ago and at the first meeting they said they will take all the tyre chips I can provide. The meeting took 10 minutes," said Mr Douglas.
The Koreans wanted the chips in bulk - a shipment of 15,000 tones or l.5 million tyres - but in the end he couldn't find a site big enough to store that amount, though the Fulton Hogan quarry at Poplar Lane, Papamoa, and Northport in Whangarei were possibilities.
The worry was that a pile that size would become a fire risk if it reached a temperature of 600C.
A year later, Mr Douglas went back to the Koreans and told them he could send smaller amounts in 20-foot equivalent containers. They agreed, so long as the supply was guaranteed - and they would even consider paying for them.
"They will take all the chips I can supply," said Mr Douglas.
"New Zealand discards four to five million car tyre equivalents (the bigger truck tyres make up five units) each year, and to begin with I'm planning on supplying two million tyres or 20,000 tonnes. That's 1000 containers (sent through Port of Tauranga)."
Carbon Recovery will initially charge $6, plus GST, for picking up a discarded tyre, producing turnover of $12 million in its first year.
Within days, Mr Douglas will be tying up an agreement with Palmerston North City Council to take the tyres deposited at its transfer station and landfills.
Once that contract is signed - and other councils including Tauranga are interested - then Mr Douglas will order the shredding machine from the United States.
He hopes to be operating at Waharoa, next to the rail line, by November with a staff of three.
The electronically-controlled CM Dual Speed Tire Shredder - the only one in this country, though there are 215 around the world - chews through 1200 car tyres or 200 truck tyres an hour.
The tyres are loaded onto a conveyor belt and pulled through the shredder by two big rollers. It takes 10 seconds to turn a truck tyre into  4-inch chips, and the sharp knives on the machine cut any protruding wires.
Mr Douglas wants to supply containers at all the transfer stations and landfills in the country, and fill them with disused tyres.
He also wants to make a similar arrangement with at least 300 independent tyre shops - there are 600 of them in the country but the other half are owned by Dunlop or Bridgestone.
Those big companies already charge the shop (and ultimately the customer) $5 for arranging collection and disposal of an end-of-life tyre.
They won't recycle them because of car safety considerations, and they have so far shunned Mr Douglas's approaches to take care of their (disposal) business.
Still, Mr Douglas is confident he can arrange tyre-collection contracts with local councils, and help clean up the piles littering the countryside.
"There are millions of tyres lying around farms, and in the end they become a liability," said Mr Douglas.
"Many of the tyres are used for silos, but pukekos and other birds peck holes in the plastic, the moisture and mice get in, and the silage is ruined.
"To overcome the problem, all farmers need to do is tip soil over the plastic and seal the silo. They have no need for the ugly tyres.
"The tyres have been sent to the farms as a way of re-using them, and the farmers don't want to pay for their collection. So who does?
"The authorities, and ultimately, the ratepayers may have to if they want to improve the environment," said Mr Douglas. "We will deliver a container anywhere. There are piles of tyres in places you wouldn't believe," he said.
Carbon Recovery has applied to the Ministry for the Environment and Environment Bay of Plenty's Enhancement Fund for grants to remove the piles, and it has its eye on the 1500 abandoned tyres on State Highway 29 just past the Kaimai School.
Carbon Recovery also made a $2.3 million tender to clean up the Napier pile by offering to bring in a portable shredding machine, chip the tyres and ship them direct to South Korea.
Instead, the government took the cheapest tender of $1.25 million, the successful claimant went bankrupt, and the pile never disappeared.
Mr Douglas, now 70, went into farming at the age of 14. He began as a labourer near Te Awamutu and 52 years later finished up owning 1200ha  comprising a dairy and two sheep and cattle farms.
He grew 90 ha of maize, milked 380 cows and grazed 5800 livestock.
By 2006 he had sold all his holdings and moved to Kaitemako Rd in Welcome Bay, buying two small blocks and running 100 cattle, 30 sheep and some pigs "so he could get up in the morning and have something to do".
After 10 years of frustration and spending $500,000 on consultants, Mr Douglas is now ready to spring into another venture - getting rid of old tyres.
"I was hoping some other bloke would come out of the woodwork and show how tyres should be discarded. But it never happened.
"I've been to many seminars, done my research and the best way to solve the problem is to chip the tyres and use them for fuel," he said.