Recently (July 2013), the Environment Agency has published a revision to its Regulatory Position Statement on “Use of PAS 108 tyre bales in civil engineering and landfill infrastructure works”, which supports a local enforcement decision to not pursue an application for an environmental permit in relation to the waste operation for the use and associated storage of tyre bales.
The Regulatory Position Statement applies where the proposed use and storage has been notified to the Environment Agency and they are satisfied that all the requirements in the Statement have been met.
It should be remembered that the Waste Resource Action Programme (WRAP) commissioned the British Standards Institution (BSI) to prepare a Publicly Available Specification, PAS 108, in collaboration with the tyres reprocessing industry. The PAS was designed to provide a specification for producing compact tyre bales of a consistent and verifiable quality and dimension.
The compression of these tyres into bales provides a valuable means of reusing these tyres whilst at the same time, reducing the demand for primary aggregate materials in construction. PAS 108 sets out to provide a specification that can be adopted by suppliers for producing tyre bales such that potential customers will be assured that they are procuring a construction material of consistent and verifiable quality.
With the publication of their Regulatory Position Statement, the Environment Agency has recognised the benefit of the reuse of tyres under the PAS and, provided the conditions of the Statement are met, will not pursue an environmental permit.
For further information, a copy of PAS 108:2007 is available for free download from the WRAP website at http://bit.ly/137HIMl and the Environment Agency’s Regulatory Position Statement is available at http://bit.ly/12HFYth