Tyre Steel Recovery: The Value Left Behind in the Wire
Tyre Steel Recovery
Rubber recovery dominates the conversation in tyre recycling, but CM Shredders argues the steel stream is where many plants quietly lose margin, because wire leaving a site coated in rubber and fibre is worth less and takes saleable rubber with it.
Mario Vazquez, Sales & Marketing Director at CM Shredders, puts it bluntly: the industry spends enormous effort on rubber recovery while the steel stream is where recyclers leave money on the table. If residual rubber is not recovered and steel quality is not maximised, the full value of each tyre processed is not being captured.
Why Magnets Alone Are Not Enough
Steel and rubber are mechanically bonded within tyre construction, so separating them efficiently takes more than magnetic separation. A magnet will pull out the steel, but it does not necessarily strip the rubber and fibre still attached to the wire.
CM uses its Liberator to mechanically free embedded steel with a patented serrated knife design. Internal screens control rubber particle size while downstream separation equipment splits the output into rubber and steel streams.
Even after liberation, some rubber and fibre stays bound to the recovered wire. That residual contamination is the gap the CM Zero Waste Wire Cleaning System was built to close.
Cleaning the Wire, Recovering the Rubber
Using secondary screening and magnetic separation, the system further cleans the steel-rich discharge while capturing rubber that would otherwise leave the plant attached to the wire.
CM Shredders reports the system can reach steel cleanliness of up to 98%, depending on feedstock and operating conditions. The result is two gains from the same incoming material: higher-value steel and additional recovered rubber.
The Arithmetic of One Percentage Point
CM illustrates the effect with a facility processing 20,000 tonnes of tyres a year. Recovering one additional percentage point of incoming material as saleable rubber amounts to 200 extra tonnes annually, from tyres the plant already paid to receive and process.
Cleaner steel also commands better market pricing, while reduced losses lift overall plant yield. None of that requires another tyre through the door.
As Vazquez frames it, the goal is not simply to process more tonnes but to extract more value from every tonne. Throughput matters, yet what counts is how much saleable material leaves the facility and what it cost to produce.
Yield Discipline as a Profitability Strategy
With the tyre recycling sector under pressure to improve both profitability and resource efficiency, looking past rubber production alone is overdue. Auditing every stream leaving the plant, including the wire, often reveals recoverable value without expanding capacity.
The same logic applies downstream. Clean, wire-free rubber is a prerequisite for high-quality end products including mulch, crumb rubber and pyrolysis feedstock, so steel liberation performance directly constrains what a site can sell into.
Turn Clean Feedstock into Guaranteed Plant Performance
Wire-free, consistently sized rubber is not just a better mulch input, it is the feedstock specification that determines whether a pyrolysis line hits its guaranteed yields. Klean Industries delivers that whole chain as KBR turnkey projects: performance-guaranteed, 100% bankable and structured so the owner carries zero technology risk.
The guarantees are backed by commercial-scale operating references rather than demonstration units, including a commercial recovered carbon black plant in Poland. When a lender asks whether the yield numbers are real, operating plants answer the question.
Developers can take either route. License the technology and integrate it with your existing shredding and liberation assets, or have Klean and KBR deliver the complete facility turnkey. Both begin with a feasibility study that models your feedstock quality, product slate and offtake.
Contact Klean Industries » GO.
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