Africa faces a growing environmental challenge with millions of waste tyres accumulating annually.
It poses health risks and contributes to pollution.
Small-scale recycling efforts like retreading and upcycling exist but they are insufficient to address the vast quantities of tyre waste.
Large-scale industrial recycling is sparse, highlighting the need for better policies and infrastructure to manage this issue effectively.
Across Africa, waste tyres are an urban environmental burden that are quite hard to miss. These wastes sit stacked behind garages, dumped along highways, or piled in open landfills where they sometimes catch on fire, sending thick black smoke drifting across entire neighborhoods.
The environmental hazards of these burning heaps have been well documented; primarily the release of a cocktail of toxic gases including benzene, sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide, that are very harmful to human health. Even when tyre piles do not burn, they quietly create another public health threat: Discarded tyres collect rainwater and become ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes that spread diseases such as malaria, dengue and chikungunya.
These risks are not confined to a few neglected landfills. They are being amplified by the millions of tyres reaching the end of their life each year across the several African nations. For instance, Nigeria alone is estimated to generate nearly 10 million waste tyres annually, while South Africa produces over 11 million and Tanzania more than 7 million. The numbers continue to rise as old vehicles (90-95 per cent of total vehicle demand) and tyre imports grow across the continent.
Each tyre may look small on its own, but together they create vast and stubborn piles of bulky non-biodegradable waste that occupy enormous space, are difficult to store, transport and can remain in the environment for decades if not properly managed. Faced with such volumes of waste tyres, the critical question is simple: What is being done to handle them?
The most visible widespread activity around discarded tyres in Africa does not take place in formal recycling facilities, but within a largely unorganised sector, where tyres are absorbed into small and often isolated practices such as retreading and upcycling.
Retreading is an age-old practice where the worn tread of a tyre is replaced while retaining the original casing, allowing the tyre to be reused; and thus, both reducing the immediate demand for new tyres, as well as delaying their entry into the waste stream.
Alongside this, another widespread activity across the continent is upcycling, where waste tyres are repurposed into products such as footwear, furniture and decorative items. Although reflecting genuine local ingenuity, upcycling practices are often individualistic and don’t operate at scale.
While these practices demonstrate that tyres do find secondary uses across the continent, they however also reveal an important limitation. Even at their most active, these practices remain inherently limited in scale and cannot realistically absorb the vast quantities of tyres entering the waste stream each year due to their dependence on niche markets and modest demand for end products. In other words, while these practices can slow the flow of waste tyre generation, they cannot solve the problem at the scale Africa now faces.
In this context, the existence and expansion of large-scale industrial recycling becomes essential — and this is precisely where Africa falters. Around the world, several industrial technologies have been developed to recycle waste tyres at scale, processing vast quantities of tyres each year. Yet across most of Africa, organised industrial tyre recycling remains sparse, with only a few countries hosting any industrial facilities — and even there, the numbers are very limited.
Understanding these technologies helps illustrate how much waste tyres could potentially be recycled if similar systems existed across Africa. Globally, tyre recycling is largely dominated by two major industrial pathways.
The first is mechanical recycling, where waste tyres are shredded and ground into crumb rubber, which is then used in manufacturing products such as playground flooring, athletic tracks, and rubber-modified bitumen for road construction.
The second is pyrolysis, a process in which tyres are heated in oxygen-free reactors to produce tyre-pyrolysis oil, carbon char, gas and steel. The oil, which has a very high calorific value but an extremely strong odor, is typically used as an industrial fuel, while the recovered steel and char enter other industrial supply chains.
In Africa, pyrolysis is one of the few industrial recycling routes that exists at all, but that too at a very small scale — typically only five or six facilities. This technology is often adopted first as it is relatively easier to establish, requires lower upfront investment and can process large quantities of tyres.
Interestingly, in many African facilities, the carbon char is simply discarded instead of being re-routed into industrial chains, effectively creating another waste stream. A rare example in the upgraded use of this char can be seen in South Africa at Mandini Energy, which converts the char into recovered carbon black (RCB) — an innovation that not only stops random char disposal, but promotes circularity through RCB’s use in the manufacture of new rubber products and tyres, reducing the dependence on virgin raw materials. In addition to that, the facility goes a step ahead by further refining the pyrolysis oil to remove its pungent odour and increase its flash point, allowing it to be used in more sensitive applications such as hospital boilers.
On the other hand, mechanical recycling into crumb rubber is even rarer. In most cases, countries that host this pathway have only one or two operators, reflecting both the limited demand for crumb-derived products, and the technical and financial barriers involved in establishing such facilities. As a result, only a tiny fraction of Africa’s tyre waste is currently processed through formal mechanical recycling systems.
South Africa, however, has pushed this pathway a step further by creating a large and stable market for crumb rubber through its use in road construction. Mathe Group in this country processes roughly 0.25 million waste tyres annually into rubber crumbs, using half of this to make rubber-modified bitumen, a material used for road construction. Their approach has allowed tyre recycling to move beyond niche applications and into large-scale infrastructure. Through projects implemented by the South African National Roads Agency, rubber-modified bitumen has already been used extensively in road development. The Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project alone incorporated RMB derived from more than 1.8 million waste tyres for 200 kilometres of roadway.
Notably, the appeal of RMB lies not only in waste tyre utilization, but also in its superior technical advantages. Roads made with crumb rubber tend to be more elastic and resilient, helping them resist cracking, rutting and fatigue under heavy traffic loads. The material also performs better under high temperatures and can extend the lifespan of road surfaces, reducing the frequency of repairs and maintenance. For countries across Africa that are rapidly expanding their road networks, this approach offers a powerful dual opportunity: Improving the durability of roads while simultaneously creating a large and sustained outlet for waste tyres.
A third recycling pathway used globally is devulcanisation, though it is almost entirely absent across the African continent. In tyre manufacturing, rubber is vulcanized, that is, treated with heat and sulphur to create strong molecular bonds that give tyres their durability but also make them difficult to reuse. Devulcanisation reverses this process by breaking these sulphur bonds, restoring the rubber’s flexibility so it can be moulded again and used as a substitute for virgin rubber in new products.
Across Africa, however, facilities using this technology are virtually non-existent. Egypt appears to host possibly the only such facility on the continent, where, the Marso Rubber plant processes roughly 0.1 million tyres annually into devulcanized rubber, which is then used to manufacture products such as car mats, anti-slip pool mats and athletic tracks.
Taken together, the central paradox of Africa’s tyre waste problem is clear: Technologies needed to recycle tyres do exist, but only in scattered pockets. The broader systems required to deploy them at scale are largely absent, making it inevitable that most countries continue to rely on informal reuse or limited disposal pathways to manage growing volumes of tyre waste.
This gap in recycling capacity unsurprisingly is closely linked to a parallel gap in policy. While a few countries- including Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa — have introduced some form of waste-tyre regulations, these frameworks often remain broad in intent and weak in implementable elements.
“It is clear from the current scenario that Africa lacks clear, targeted regulatory measures to systematically manage their end-of-life tyres. said Ishita Garg, programme manager at the Centre for Science and Environment.-
For the existing and developing regulations to work effectively and make real change in the scale of waste tyre management, they must go beyond broad declarations and include actionable elements — both financial and technical — that translate into measurable recovery outcomes on the ground.”