Protyre News

Protyre, one of the largest and fastest growing tyre retailers in the UK, has come to the rescue of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (YWT) by helping to remove over 1,000 tyres illegally fly tipped at the Trust’s Brockadale nature reserve.
 
Following the discovery of the tyres at the entrance to the Brockadale reserve, located near Little Smeaton in North Yorkshire, YWT made an urgent appeal for assistance to help remove and dispose them from the site.
 
Protyre answered the call and dispatched a team from their Sheffield centre to assess the tyres, before making arrangements to have them removed and taken away for recycling.
 
As part of the assessment process, Protyre’s expert team discovered that many of the tyres, were illegal part worn tyres, raising concerns they may have been dumped by rogue traders operating in a largely uncontrolled market.
 
 Simon Hiorns, Protyre Retail Director, said: “The illegal fly tipping of over 1000 tyres in an area of outstanding natural beauty and a crucial habitat for wildlife is a terrible act of environmental vandalism.
 
“When we were alerted to what had happened, our immediate response was to offer our help and expertise to Yorkshire Wildlife Trust to remove this blight on the reserve.
 
“Our inspection team attended the site to inspect the tyres, established they were safe to remove and then made the arrangements to dispose of them with our recycling partner.
 
“What was interesting from our inspection was the number of illegal part worn tyres we identified. Illegal part worn tyres are the scourge of the tyre industry, sold by unscrupulous traders with no consideration of the safety and environmental risks they pose.
 
“The environmental impact comes from the four million additional scrap casings generated for disposal in the UK that comes from illegal part worn tyres. This incident of fly tipping at the reserve may well be linked to this disposal process.”
 
Once the tyres are removed from the Brockadale Nature Reserve, they will be taken to Protyre’s recycling partner, Tyre Renewals. As part of the recycling process the tyres will be granulated and the tyre crumb produced used for a range of purposes including sports surfaces and safety mats for children’s play areas.
 
It’s estimated that around 6 million part worn tyres are sold in the UK each year, with 99% sold illegally due to them not being properly marked or tested and around 34% of these
contain potentially dangerous forms of damage or defects.
 
Protyre and its parent company Micheldever Tyre Services (MTS), one of the UK’s largest tyre wholesalers, has campaigned extensively on the issue of illegal part worn tyres, working with respected industry bodies such as TyreSafe, the UK’s leading tyre safety charity, to highlight the issue.