Scrapping bicycle tyres may be about to become illegal. Here’s how to recycle yours

I think that's why the qualifier 'looks set to' is in there. The bill itself doesn't do much banning or requiring of anything specific. It mandates authorities to consider how to improve waste management, and does a lot of 'conferring the power to' take some kind of generic action.

Velorim are claiming that the government has 'signalled intent' to use those powers to ban sending bicycle tyres to landfill. That seems to be based on a rather liberal extrapolation from government confirming that 'tyres will be one of its five priority waste streams'. On the face of it, though, the latter doesn't necessarily imply the former - they could be thinking more about cracking down harder on illegal disposal of car tyres, or improving the methods used to recycle them, or even just incentivising the recycling of bicycle tyres.

My thoughts exactly. The comparison with a ban on dumping car tyres doesn't work for me. I imagine that the vast majority of car tyres are changed by a garage rather than the end user, and the garage then factors any recycling / disposal charge for the old tyres into the price charged to the consumer. Yes, some bike tyres and tubes are changed by shops, but I imagine the majority are done by consumers, and you need to make it as easy as possible for them to recycle if you want to have an impact. Charging them to recycle on a per item basis is no incentive.       

I guess because melting down and reusing tyres which, even if they don't meet your own quality standards for sale, have still been produced in your own controlled conditions, is a way of minimising your own losses, whereas collecting and processing used and contaminated product from elsewhere could conceivably be loss-making. Which is presumably why Velorim are charging to recycle.      

Gus T wrote:

I may be wrong but I'm sure I saw a video of a tour of the Schwalbe factory where they said faulty tyres are melted down and the rubber reused. Can anyone explain why this can't this be done?

I'm pretty sure vulcanisation of rubber is a one way process which cross-links the polymer chains, making the rubber harder wearing. But then I didn't think you could just "melt it down" thereafter.

Yeah, they do seem about a factor of 10 too high.  Given that in the last 40,000km of riding I've worn out 4 tyres and 5 tubes (yay, puncture patches) I'm not sure where all these dead tyres are supposed to be coming from 

83,562 tyres per day...

417,808 inner tubes per day 🤔

And Velorim will charge 50p per tyre, meaning they could stand to make £40k per day. Sounds like someone's been cooking the books to justify a scheme.

Perhaps road.cc could help by providing the source of that 44,000 tonnes of tyres and inner tubes to landfill. The Association of Cycle Traders website hosts a page inviting people to take part in the survey (in association with Velorim... https://www.cycleassociation.uk/news/?id=2388 ) but I can't find any actual reports explaining the findings or methodology.

The Velorim website quotes the numbers in the article above with no sourcing whatsoever.

You must really hate on tyres to burn them in 4,000km! May I ask what tyres you're using? I've often wondered if cassettes/chains/chain rings which are almost entirely metal can be recycled in household recycling. 

I can also get through a 'race' tyre on the rear in 4-5,000 km. Tyres like Vittoria Corsa or Conti 4000/5000, etc. A lot depends on local road surfaces, spray and chip seems to act like coarse grade sandpaper.

I guess I'm lucky - currently an 8000km old GP4000SII on my summer bike back wheel (although it only goes out in sunshine), and just replaced the rear GP4Season at 7800km on my commuter! Another thing - if I wear the rear tyre but the front's okay, I just replace the rear, so my average front tyre lasts ~12000km.

Regardless of individual wear-rates I'd have thought the 'average' cyclist probably doesn't get near the mileage required to wear out tyres in less than a year, so the throw-away rate should be ~1-2 tyres per cyclist/year at worst.  

I find that puncture resistance is massively reduced beyond this point... I use Contis... Agree on the metals 

That's why I'm now exclusively using Chris King parts wherever I can (except on my town bike for obvious reasons).

Their world famous tyres, inner tubes and cassettes ?

You are so right on!  major appliances in the US went from lasting on average 24 years to 8 to 12 years today, so we throw away huge refrigerators, etc now.  My washing machine I bought lasted 4 whole years, my previous one lasted 31 years.

If major manufactures don't want to make products to last a long time and therefore benefit the worlds environment, guess what that means besides money greed?  It means that no one above the average citizen gives a rats ass about the environment like they claim they do.

I can bet you that if America started a tire recycling law it would only be so that wherever we turn it in to can charge us a fee to dispose of it...greed again.

Many people tke their bikes to shops to have a puncture repaired. They all just throw away the damaged one and replace with new.

do the numbers really matter that much for a start,what numbers would you be less cynical with, half, quarter, 1/10th ? does it matter if only 3 million tyres and 1million inner tubes end up in landfill, they are still whacking big numbers of stuff thrown away that should be recycled, that should be the take away point we can do better.

as for how accurate are they anyway, well I believe theyll be based on items sold estimated from the survey of bike retailers and so its a ball park estimate,but in the last year,well Ive got two bikes and gone through 4 tyres & probably a couple of inner tubes at least, and I dont ride monster miles or cover lots of puncture prolific roads/trails. I wouldnt generally repair an inner tube unless I was forced to, Ive not had much success with patches before, and as I tend to ride by myself without the safety net of a team car coming to my rescue on speed dial, I like to think of inner tubes without patches as one less thing I have to worry about if i can, so I replace with new if I have any problems or punctures with them, so I dont think the numbers are massively out even if they might seem to be overstating the problem

If numbers don't matter, don't use them. Quoting bogus statistics to make an argument puts your credibility at risk. If cyclists truly are experiencing five flats per tire over its lifetime, there are some serious problems with road condition and debris that need to be addressed. I would suggest that patching could be seen as a practice to support for environmental as well as economic reasons. If your patches are failing, learn how to do it right. I've run tubes with a dozen patches without having one fail. I carry at least one spare tube and a patch kit, replacing the tube on the road, and patching it when I get home. The patched tube goes back in the bag for the next flat. As tire widths increase and pressures go down, patching only gets easier to do successfully. Re-purposing a tube as raw material for other products is not true recycling, but just temporarily diverting it from the waste stream.