Finland welcoming new tyre-to-oil facility

Finland – Finnish company Ecomation announced that it will open a tyre recycling facility this month that will recycle the end-of-life tyres into oil on an ‘industrial scale’. The new site, located in the city of Nokia, will be able to process 8000 tonnes of post-consumer tyres per year.

Upwards of 50 000 tons of tyres are discarded in Finland annually, according to the country’s compliance scheme Finnish Tyre Recycling – which represents 280 tyre producers and 2900 collection points. It adds that the recovery rate ‘has been close to 100%’ over the last few years.

Ecomation ceo Tommi Pajala says the new recycling plant relies on a ‘modified’ pyrolysis system that yields ‘high grade’ oil that can be used for heating and can also converted into diesel or petrol at a refinery. The equipment on-site has been fine-tuned for the last eight years to optimise operations.

‘Ours is the first pyrolysis plant in Finland that extracts oil from tyres on an industrial scale, and our Nokia facility is the most modern and safest of its kind in the world,’ Pajala comments. The businessman hopes that the process will be a new benchmark for the waste-to-oil industry.