Millions of UK tyres meant for recycling sent to furnaces in India

Millions of tyres being sent from the UK to India for recycling are actually being "cooked" in makeshift furnaces causing serious health problems and huge environmental damage, the BBC has discovered.

The majority of the UK's exported waste tyres are sold into the Indian black market, and this is well known within the industry, BBC File on 4 Investigates has been told.

"I don't imagine there's anybody in the industry that doesn't know it's happening," says Elliot Mason, owner of one of the biggest tyre recycling plants in the UK.

Campaigners and many of those in the industry - including the Tyre Recovery Association (TRA) - say the government knows the UK is one of the worst offenders for exporting waste tyres for use in this way.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has told us it has strict controls on exporting waste tyres, including unlimited fines and jail time.

When drivers get their tyres changed, garages charge a small recycling fee - it can vary, but it is normally about £3-6 for each end-of-life tyre.

This should guarantee that they are recycled - either in the UK or abroad - at facilities like Elliot Mason's Rubber World, in Rushden, Northampton.

His facility has repurposed tyres into tiny rubber crumbs since 1996. Rubber crumb is often used as flooring for equestrian centres and children's playgrounds.

The UK ends up with about 50 million waste tyres (nearly 700,000 tonnes) in need of recycling every year and around half of those are exported to India - according to official figures - where they should end up in recycling plants.

Before tyres leave the UK they are compressed into huge rubber cubes known as "bales".

"The pretence is that baled tyres are being sent to India and then shredded and granulated in a factory very similar to ours," explains Mr Mason.

However, some 70% of tyres imported by India from the UK and the rest of the world end up in makeshift industrial plants, where they are subjected to what amounts to an extreme form of cooking, the TRA estimates.

In an oxygen-free environment, in temperatures of about 500C, a process known as pyrolysis takes place. Steel and small amounts of oil are extracted, as well as carbon black - a powder or pellet that can be used in various industries.

The pyrolysis plants - often in rural backwaters - are akin to homemade pressure cookers and produce dangerous gases and chemicals.

UK tyres are ending up in these Indian pyrolysis plants, despite legitimate official paperwork stating they are headed for legal Indian recycling centres.

Together with SourceMaterial - a non-profit journalism group - we wanted to follow the long journey UK tyres make. Trackers were hidden in shipments of tyres to India by an industry insider.

The shipments went on an eight-week journey and eventually arrived in an Indian port, before being driven 800 miles cross-country, to a cluster of soot-covered compounds beside a small village.

Drone footage, taken in India and shared with the BBC, showed the tyres reaching a compound - where thousands were waiting to be thrown into huge furnaces to undergo pyrolysis.

BBC File on 4 Investigates approached one of the companies operating in the compound. It confirmed it was processing some imported tyres but said what it was doing wasn't dangerous or illegal.

There are up to 2,000 pyrolysis plants in India, an environmental lawyer in India told the BBC. Some are licensed by the authorities but around half are unlicensed and therefore illegal, he said.

At a different cluster of makeshift plants in Wada, just outside Mumbai, a team from BBC Indian Languages saw soot, dying vegetation and polluted waterways around the sites. Villagers complained of persistent coughs and eye problems.

"We want these companies moved from our village," one witness told us, "otherwise we will not be able to breathe freely."

Scientists at Imperial College London told the BBC plant workers continually exposed to the atmospheric pollutants produced by pyrolysis, were at risk of respiratory, cardiovascular and neurological diseases and certain types of cancer.

At the site the BBC visited in Wada, two women and two children were killed in January when there was an explosion at one of the plants. It had been processing European-sourced tyres.

The BBC approached the owners of the plant where the explosion happened but they haven't responded.

Following the blast, a public meeting was held and a minister for the district of Wada promised that the local government would take action. Seven pyrolysis plants have since been shut down by the authorities.

The Indian government has also been approached for comment.

Many UK businesses will bale tyres and send them to India because it is more profitable and investing in shredding machinery is expensive, according to Mr Mason.

But he says he isn't prepared to do this himself because he has a duty of care to make sure his company's waste is going to the right place - and it is very difficult to track where tyre bales end up.

Bigger businesses, like Rubber World, have tightly regulated environmental permits and are inspected regularly. But smaller operators can apply for an exemption and trade and lawfully export more easily.

This is called a T8 exemption and allows these businesses to store and process up to 40 tonnes of car tyres a week.

But many traders told the BBC that they exported volumes of tyres in excess of the permitted limit, meaning they would have been exporting more tyres than they should.

The BBC was tipped off about several of these companies and teamed up with an industry insider who posed as a broker with a contract to sell waste tyres to India.

Four of the six dealers we contacted said they processed large numbers of waste tyres.

One told us he had exported 10 shipping containers that week - about 250 tonnes of tyres, more than five times his permitted limit.

Another dealer first showed us paperwork which suggested his tyres were baled and sent to India for recycling which would have been allowed - but he then admitted he knew they were going to India for pyrolysis. The Indian government has made it illegal for imported tyres to be used for pyrolysis.

"There are plenty of companies [that do it]... 90% of English people [are] doing this business," he told us, adding that he cannot control what happens when tyres arrive in India.

When we asked if he had concerns about the health of those people living and working near the pyrolysis plants he responded: "These issues are international. Brother, we can't do anything… I'm not a health minister."

Defra told the BBC that the UK government is considering reforms on waste exemptions.

"This government is committed to transitioning to a circular economy, moving to a future where we keep our resources in use for longer while protecting our natural environment," a spokesperson said.

In 2021, Australia banned exports of baled tyres after auditors checked to see where they were really ending up. Lina Goodman, the CEO of Tyre Stewardship Australia, told the BBC that "100% of the material was not going to the destinations that were on the paperwork".

Fighting Dirty founder Georgia Elliott-Smith says sending tyres from the UK to India for pyrolysis is a "massive unrecognised problem" which the UK government should deal with. She wants tyres redefined as "hazardous waste".

Additional reporting by Janhavee Moole and Shahid Shaikh, BBC Marathi