Recovery of waste Products Resulting from Post-consumer Tyres Processing

Waste products resulting from post-consumer tyres processing represent an important issue in the overall management system for end-of-life tyres. Tyre-fluff waste represents, in fact, a product difficult to recover mainly for the intimate contact between not recovered rubber, steel wires and textile materials. In this paper a study has been carried out in order to identify and set up the best strategies to perform the maximum recovery of such a kind of waste, actually land-filled. More in detail the possibility to perform a separation of the different previous mentioned materials, with particular reference to steel wires, textile fibers and rubber, was investigated. Selected tyre-fluff waste samples, characterized by different manufacturing characteristics and origin, have been thus considered adopting a processing layout based: i) on the preliminary adoption of specialized comminution strategies, blade mill based, working at room temperature and ii) on the further application of combined electrostatic and magnetic separations applied to the different milled products. Results showed as the proposed strategies produce a different recovery of the different tyre-fluff components, according to the different particulate products characteristics resulting from the processing.