Africa’s waste tyre story: From burning heaps to circular hopes

Africa has become a global hub for second-hand vehicles, many of which arrive with already worn-out tyres. Over 60 per cent of registered vehicles on the continent are used imports, and a projected increase of 10 million vehicles by 2050 will largely comprise the same. This means that tyres in Africa are discarded much earlier, triggering a growing wave of waste.

Black towers of discarded tyres, stacked in endless rows spilling across open grounds, are a haunting sight in many African countries. Each dawn, heavy trucks dump more onto the piles, feeding what seems like an unending problem. The smoke from occasional tyre fires drifting through neighbourhoods is a stark reminder that this waste poses both public health and environmental risks, contributing to asthma, respiratory diseases and even cancer.

These tyre fires are notoriously hard to extinguish and can burn for weeks — and a million burning tyres can produce more than 55,000 gallons of oil, contaminating soil and groundwater. Unburnt tyres are not harmless either. When left in open spaces, they collect rainwater and become perfect breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes. A single tyre can spawn up to 10,000 mosquitoes in one breeding season — endangering entire communities.

Across the continent, the headlines echo one another — from the open, illegal burning of tyres in Ghana, to black smoke rising over highways during protests in Kenya, and the tyres burnt daily to roast animal hides in Nigeria. The details may differ, but the pattern does not: Tyre waste has become a shared African crisis, visible from Nairobi to Johannesburg.

Struggles and strategies for tackling tyre waste

Most African countries lack recycling facilities for waste tyres, policies targeted towards their management, and even reliable data on the quantity being generated. Where such data does exist, it is often inconsistent. Without accurate information, trends cannot be assessed, targets cannot be set, and the impacts of interventions cannot be measured. Before national tyre waste management roadmaps can be developed, reliable data collection is the foremost need of the hour.

Amid this bleak picture, there are sparks of progress. A few countries have begun to respond to the crisis in their own ways by drafting policies, setting up recycling units, and experimenting with small-scale solutions.

In Kenya, for instance, EcoPro currently stands as the country’s only formal tyre recycler, recovering rubber from around 350,000 waste tyres annually. The company breaks down tyres mechanically into small granules, after separating the fibre and steel. From these variously sized rubber granules, tiles and mats are produced that are up to 40 per cent cheaper than imports. EcoPro’s contribution to Kenya’s tyre waste recycling landscape is significant, yet the firm currently operates in a vacuum of regulatory support.

While Kenya has enacted frameworks such as the Environmental Management and Co-ordination Act (1999) and the Sustainable Waste Management Act (2022), these only provide generic oversight. There is still no law dedicated to tyre recycling. The absence of financial incentives such as tax rebates and subsidies further discourages investment and innovation in the sector. The result is clear: although more than three million tyres reach the end of their life each year, only 11 per cent are recycled. Kenya needs to build a system that enables more recyclers to enter the market, turning one company’s initiative into a nationwide industrial practice.

In contrast, Ghana has taken a step ahead. The country has strengthened its regulatory framework through the amended Environmental Protection Act (2025), which introduces eco-levies on tyres and producer responsibility obligations. Under this rule, all manufacturers and importers of tyres must register with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and pay an eco-levy that funds the environmentally sound management of waste tyres. Producers are also obligated to take back all tyres they sell or manufacture.

Moreover, organisations such as the Mountain Research Institute, working with the EPA, have identified major pathways for recycling waste tyres and conducted pilot studies to test their feasibility. One of Ghana’s most promising initiatives involves mechanically crumbing old tyres into fine rubber chips for artificial turf. A local company that now processes nearly 400 tonnes of tyres a day invested in this technology and overcame installation and operational challenges with expert help.

However, even amid progress, Ghana still lacks the cornerstone of effective policy: consistent and reliable data. The country’s last reported estimate for waste tyre generation dates back to 2019 — at 0.15 million tonnes — and even then, figures for recycling volumes were unavailable. Moreover, there is little standardisation in the sector. For instance, Ghana has around nine major pyrolysis plants, but they operate without any national standard operating procedures (SOP), leading to inconsistent technical and environmental performance.

“We must develop technical guidelines and national SOPs for pyrolysis plants and establish a national platform for knowledge-sharing across the sector,” said Sampson Antiemo, executive chairman of the Mountain Research Institute, Ghana. “Ghana already has standards for tyre imports, but we now need to actively enforce these quality standards to tackle the tyre management issue at its root. Without these changes, our progress will remain incomplete.”

A full circle for South Africa

Meanwhile, South Africa’s story has come full circle. For years, it was the model the rest of Africa looked up to — a country with world-class legislation, a functioning tyre levy system, and recyclers operating at industrial scale. The National Environmental Management Waste Act (NEMWA, 2008) built a legal framework for waste planning and introduced tools such as Industry Waste Management Plans (IndWMPs) and Extended Producer Responsibility.

The most successful of these was the Recycling and Economic Development Initiative of South Africa (REDISA), launched in 2013. Funded directly through a small waste management fee of $0.13 per kilogram of tyres produced or imported, REDISA raised tyre recovery rates from 4 per cent to 42 per cent within four years. The idea was simple: every tyre producer would pay a levy, and that money would fund the collection and recycling of used tyres. Between 2013 and 2017, REDISA collected about 0.45 million tonnes of waste tyres, managed over 3,000 collection points, and built 20 depots — a scale unprecedented elsewhere on the continent.

The collapse of these frameworks after 2016, however, exposed deep governance flaws. The government replaced REDISA’s autonomous body with the state-run Waste Management Bureau (WMB) and continued the same waste management fee, renaming it a tyre levy. But bureaucratic inefficiencies meant that the WMB lacked direct access to funds, leaving recyclers waiting endlessly for payments that often never came. As a result, operations stalled, tyre stockpiles grew from 0.02 million tonnes in 2017 to 0.15 million tonnes by 2022, and many recyclers exited the system.

Today, a few determined companies such as the Mathe Group, Trident Fuels, Mandini, and Dawahi Rubber Recycling continue to keep the recycling system alive, though largely through their own efforts. Mathe Group, for instance, processes roughly one-fifth of South Africa’s recovered stock — about 53,000 tonnes of waste tyres out of the 300,000 tonnes generated annually — producing a wide range of products from high-quality crumb rubber, including bitumen-rubber roads, non-slip flooring, and sports surfaces. Yet, how long such recyclers can survive without stable regulatory support remains uncertain.

African nations must now develop robust ecosystems for waste tyre management to transform the continent’s tyre story from crisis to opportunity. This system must involve not only recyclers and governments but also hold tyre manufacturers responsible for managing the waste they create.

As Ishita Garg, programme manager at the Delhi-based think tank  Centre for Science and Environment, puts it: “Producers need to move beyond mere compliance and become active drivers of circular practices. They should invest in research that closes the material loop — finding methods to incorporate waste tyres into new tyre manufacture. They must also be mandated to develop systems for collecting and recovering waste tyres, instead of letting them leak into the environment.”