Australian recycler on track for second plant 

Queensland, Australia – Tire recycler Green Distillation Technologies (GDT) is on track to build its second reprocessing plant in Toowoomba, Queensland, the Australian company has announced.

Construction work was to start on the plant last year, but the company faced problems raising the finance to fund the AUD$12 million (€7 million) project.

However, the company said it successfully completed a round of private equity fund raising for $30 million in February and is now on track to construct the plant while bringing its existing facility at Warren in Western New South Wales to full production.

To be built at the Wellcamp Business Park, near the Airport, the Toowoomba factory will process 658,000 end of life tires per year into eight million litres of oil, 7,700 tonnes of carbon black and 2,000 tonnes of steel, GDT said 8 April.

The recycler expects to send the oil to the Southern Oil refinery at Gladstone, where the product is regarded as “light crude” with low sulphur contents, said company chief operating officer Trevor Bayley.

Green Distillation has developed an emissions-free “proprietary technology” which is capable of recycling end?of?life car and truck tires into saleable commodities of carbon, oil and steel.

The company claims that the oil produced through its technology is comparable with “light crude, which is low in sulphur and easy to refine into petrol, diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum based products.”

GDC also maintains that the carbon produced in the process is a high-grade product with high potential for sale as carbon black.