News24 | ‘Pure’ steel and your gym training floor: KZN firm gives new life to old tyres

Both the steel and the rubber in tyres can be extracted for recycling.

• A South African tyre processor has invested in new equipment to extract high-purity steel from tyres.
• The new equipment enables Mathe Group to reduce rubber contamination to under 2%.
• Rubber from the tyres is repurposed to build roads, create shock pads for hockey fields and manufacture gym flooring.
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A South African tyre processor, Mathe Group, invested in new equipment to extract “clean steel” from tyres, which will be exported to India and South Korea.

The new debearding machines will replace existing equipment, which is oil-driven and costly to maintain, thus reducing emissions and operating costs.

“The equipment is actually an upgrade to our existing tyre recycling facility, whereby we’re removing the steel from the tyre but much more efficiently and with a much higher purity,” said Mehran Zarrebini, CEO of Mathe Group.

According to Zarrebini, approximately 300 000 tonnes of waste tyre material per annum are generated in South Africa.

There are two stages to the process, and two types of steel within a tyre.

“Within a tyre, especially a radial truck tyre, you have the wire bead that’s in the sidewall of the tyre and then you have the remainder of the steel which is actually embedded within the remainder of the tyre,” Zarrebini told News24.

The first process would be to remove the bead from the tyre.

“There is a newer method of extracting that steel from the sidewall of the tyre so that it keeps its integrity and is essentially free of rubber. That means it is of much higher grade than what was previously extracted. This also creates potential new end uses for the product,” said Zarrebini.

The steel is worth more than most scrap metal.

“If you have new equipment that enables you to reduce the percentage of rubber contamination to approximately under 2%, you can command a much higher price internationally, and that’s essentially what we wanted.”

A lot of the tyre rubber is recycled into the building of new roads, and Mathe Group also works with the sporting sector, including creating shock pads underneath hockey fields.

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“So we make a variety of gym flooring which is used extensively in South Africa with all the gymnasiums that are being built and for the refurbishment of those facilities,” said Zarrebini.

The Mathe group is recycling between 800 and 1 000 truck tyres per day.

The new steel extraction equipment will be fully operational by January 2026.