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Credential
Environmental, the UK’s leading collector and reprocessor
of used tyres, shreds millions into tyre ‘chip’
pieces of rubber approximately 50mm x 50mm that have a variety
of uses.
This tyre ‘chip’ is the raw material for our cryogenic
recycling process. Every day we take delivery of up to 80 tonnes
of chip and put it through our state of the art process.
The ‘chip’ is loaded into an enclosed freeze chamber
and cooled using quantities of inert liquid nitrogen. The 17m
chamber takes the chip, cooling all the way along the 15 minute
journey, to our banks of mechanical hammers.
When
the chip reaches the hammers, it has been cooled to a temperature
of –80 degrees centigrade where the rubber becomes very
brittle. The hammers are enclosed in large steel chambers mounted
some 2.5m below ground level, where drive shafts running through
the chambers propel the hammers to strike against themselves
thousands of times each minute.
As these hammers hit the frozen tyre chip, they smash rubber
off in pieces of various size (known as grade) of tyre ‘crumb’.
This crumb is then extracted from the hammer chambers and graded
and sorted within the plant into one of 6 grades of crumb for
further treatment or direct use.
Other materials, including steel and fibre are recovered through
the process, and these are also recycled, making the process
100% efficient.
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