To investigate what impacts various solutions have on the environment, the most common and advanced tool to describe it is a Life Cycle Assessment.
Over the last decade there has been more and more focus on these areas, and highly respected scientists from IFEU in Heidelberg, Germany, the FORCE Institute and Copenhagen Resource Institute in Denmark have been making comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment studies comparing different routes for the disposal of ELTs.
The studies have been performed strictly according to ISO 14040 and 14044 standards with appropriate peer review by independent scientists.
The results are tremendously clear. Material recycling, where the quality of the output rubber granulate is high enough to substitute virgin rubber in applications like asphalt and bitumen modification and/or artificial turf is significantly superior to incineration in cement kilns.
This is even more evident when it is compared to so-called civil engineering applications, where the shredded tyres are used as filling material as sublayers in roads or as the drainage layers in landfills.
A massive potential reduction in greenhouse gases can be achieved by switching from civil engineering applications and incineration/combustion in cement kilns to material recycling.
As an example of the magnitude of the reduction in the EU, each year, 1.1 million tonnes of ELTs are incinerated in cement kilns.
If these ELTs were properly recycled instead, the CO2-savings would be more than 1.2 million tonnes.