Used tires

Aerial view of a used tire dump at the cement plant in Harburg (Swabia), Donau-Ries, Swabia, Bavaria, taken on May 24, 2008.

The massive landfill for decommissioned tires at a cement plant near Harburg in Swabia appears both fascinating and disconcerting. Rubber is a very difficult raw material to recycle, but new methods are intended to use asphalt and tire rubber here to create a composite material for road construction.

(Hoch über Bayern, page 16)

(Update: No composite material for road construction is being produced at the Märker cement plant in Harburg. The used tires are used here only as a secondary raw material for combustion and to generate temperatures of approximately 1,450 degrees Celsius for cement production.)