Tasmania to build a new tire recycling plant

Australia's Green Distillation Technology (GDT) plans to build a massive new tire recycling facility on the neighboring Tasmania island of Langford. Construction of the US $ 6.2 million plant is scheduled to begin in November this year. Operations at the facility are expected to begin next summer.

The new plant, according to experts, will have the capacity to process almost 658,000 tires from cars and trucks annually. The plant will use GDT's proprietary distillation processing technology. These technologies are able to turn them into marketable products - carbon, oil and steel in the process of recycling the tires that have reached their end of life. The facility will convert used tires (ELT) by weight to 40 percent carbon, 35 percent oil and 15 percent steel.

Proprietary GDT technology uses controlled heat to reduce the breakdown of the constituent elements of whole tires, which will then be reformed into oils, distilled and collected. The carbon comes in the form of a high purity powder. Emission-free technology also allows steel to be recovered from waste tires. In addition, the GDT process is the only one available in this country for converting the rubber contained in the ELT into another form.

According to local media reports, a recycling facility will be set up in Langford, where a warehouse of about 1.3 million used tires is located. Data shows that nearly 50,000 waste tires accumulate in Tasmania every year.

The company is also modernizing its tire recycling plant in Warren, NSW, with an investment of over US $ 5.8 million. The refurbishment of the facility will reportedly increase the annual processing capacity to around 19,000 tonnes. It is estimated that 24,000,000 used tires are generated in Australia each year. GDT has hinted that the capacity of its Tasmanian plant at Langford will be nearly equivalent to the capacity of the modernized plant in Australia.