Tyrewise: Eight Million End-of-Life Tyres Collected in Two Years
Tyre Stewardship Scheme
New Zealand’s Tyrewise scheme has collected more than eight million end-of-life tyres in its first two years of operation, with its second annual report recording 65,765 tonnes gathered in the 12 months to 31 March 2026.
Tyrewise began operating on 1 September 2024 as Aotearoa New Zealand’s first regulated product stewardship scheme. The latest report, released on 21 October 2026, is the first to cover a full twelve months of collections.
What the Second Year Shows
The 65,765 tonnes collected over the reporting year are equivalent to roughly 8.2 million passenger car tyres. Of that total, 34,599 tonnes were processed into tyre-derived products and fuel.
More than 5,000 registered participants across the automotive industry now feed the scheme, spanning retailers, fitters, collectors and processors.
Scheme manager 3R Group frames year two as the point where participation stopped being a compliance exercise. Chief executive Adele Rose has said the majority of those tyres would previously have been lost to landfill and now contribute to a circular economy creating value and jobs in New Zealand.
The first annual report covered only seven months of collection data, so the second provides the first clean baseline. Tyrewise tracks tyres through its registered participant network across the lifecycle, which is what makes the tonnage auditable rather than estimated.
Why Collection Is the Easy Half
Collection at this scale solves the visible problem. Tyres no longer accumulate in landfills, illegal stockpiles and dump sites, and the environment and local communities are the direct beneficiaries.
It does not by itself solve the harder problem, which is what the material becomes. Roughly half the collected tonnage was processed into tyre-derived products and fuel during the reporting year.
Tyre-derived fuel moves volume and displaces coal, but it is a one-way exit for the carbon and the steel bound up in every tyre burned. That is the gap every maturing stewardship scheme eventually confronts.
Once collection is reliable and tonnage is predictable, the question shifts from where the tyres go to how much value is extracted before they are gone.
Pyrolysis answers that question differently. It recovers carbon black, oil, steel and process gas from the same feedstock, converting a disposal cost into saleable commodities and keeping the carbon inside the materials economy rather than sending it up a stack.
A scheme carrying two years of verified tonnage, a national participant register and a published processing split is precisely the feedstock base a recovery plant can be underwritten against. The data problem that normally stalls these projects has already been solved here.
New Zealand geography makes the economics unusual but not unworkable. Long haulage distances and limited domestic processing capacity both argue for regional plants sized to real catchments rather than a single national facility.
Build Recovery Capacity on Verified Tyre Tonnage
Klean Industries builds tyre pyrolysis and recovered carbon black plants on a KBR turnkey basis: performance-guaranteed, 100% bankable, and delivered so the process risk sits with us and not with the scheme participants funding it.
Our references are commercial-scale and operating, including a recovered carbon black plant in Poland and delivered resource recovery projects across several continents. Audited stewardship tonnage of the kind Tyrewise now publishes is exactly the input those feasibility models need.
Choose either route. License the technology and build it under your own banner, or have KBR engineer, build, commission and guarantee the facility turnkey. Send us your catchment tonnage and we will size the plant against it.
Contact Klean Industries » GO.
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