Millions of used UK tyres are being shipped to India to make dirty fuel harming people and the environment 

The explosion was so loud that for a few seconds Kalpesh Patil thought his heart had stopped. The sounds of the village—cockerels crowing, buffaloes lowing—went dead. Then his phone rang.

It was his mother, still working in the chickpea fields at 6pm. 

“There’s been a blast at the company,” she told him in Marathi, the local language in Wada, about 80 kilometres north of Mumbai.

Patil ran, sprinting through bean fields as neighbours stood motionless, eyes fixed on the long building with its pencil-thin chimneys where a fire was already roaring.

“The noise was so loud I can’t describe it,” he said. “Huge black plumes of smoke were rising.”

Like hundreds of other villages across India, Wada is home to a pyrolysis plant: an industrial-scale oven that boils used tyres to make cheap fuel. It’s a dangerous business that covers workers in carcinogenic soot and fills the air with toxic fumes. Accidents are common, while nearby farmers report dying crops and poisoned water.

India—the world’s biggest buyer of waste tyres—outlawed importing them for pyrolysis in 2022. But an investigation by SourceMaterial and BBC File on 4 Investigates found that the trade is thriving. Tracking devices planted by an industry insider and undercover reporting reveal that shipments are routinely reaching India from the UK, still the biggest exporter of tyres to India despite the ban.

The tracked tyres went on an eight-week journey, arriving in an Indian port before being driven 800 miles to a cluster of soot-covered sites beside a small village. Drone footage captured the trucks entering a compound where thousands of tyres waited to be fed into furnaces.

Since India’s ban, UK exports to India have even increased. Upwards of 50 million British tyres could be being burned illegally in India each year, with grave consequences for human health and the environment.

“We’ve seen photographic evidence for some of the plants,” said Peter Taylor, secretary general of the UK Tyre Recovery Association. “It really is very distressing.”

In Wada, when Patil arrived panting at the pyrolysis plant, he realised he was too late. The building was a smoking ruin and a body had been laid out in the dust. Two children, aged one and three, and their mothers, workers who lived on the site, had been killed.

Three months on, a new plant is already under construction—and 12 pyrolysis boilers are running nearby.

“This is so wrong. We want these companies moved from our village,” he said. “They should be asked to leave. We will not be able to breathe freely.”

‘It doesn’t stack up’

In Britain, drivers whose tyres have worn to a 1.5 millimetre tread are legally required to change them. Garages usually charge an “environmental disposal” fee of between £1 and £3 a tyre. The waste tyres are then sold for recycling for as little as 30p or even given away for free.

But the UK’s recycling industry isn’t what it might seem: the likelihood of an old tyre meeting an environmentally responsible end—reborn as shoe soles or crash mats—is small, said one recycler who runs a facility near Oxford and asked not to be named.

Before recycling, tyres need to be shredded. But the £750,000 shredder in his yard is standing idle. Instead a much cheaper machine, bought for just £30,000, compresses tyres into bales to be loaded onto lorries bound for ports like Southampton or Felixstowe.

“Financially it just doesn’t stack up,” the recycler said. “We wouldn’t be able to survive if we were shredding, because the maintenance costs are high and the price for tyres is too low. So we have to export.”

According to export documents, these tyres are set to be recycled in India. But Indian companies rarely return the paperwork to prove tyres have been responsibly disposed of. In all likelihood they will end up in pyrolysis factories.

“There’s not a lot we can do about it,” said the recycler.

Tracking devices

SourceMaterial and the BBC used data from tracking devices planted in containers of used tyres to follow shipments from the UK to India. The data suggests that exports earmarked for recycling are routinely—and illegally—being used for pyrolysis.  

Last year, trackers in two tyre bales bought by Nine Corporation, India’s second-biggest tyre importer, arrived at Mundra port in northeast India.

But despite signed documents suggesting the company received the tyres for recycling, they didn’t travel to the company’s recycling plant in Gujarat. Instead they were driven to a site in Madhya Pradesh hundreds of kilometres to the east.

Two tyre bales sent in an earlier consignment in 2023 arrived in Haryana, 900 kilometres to the north.

Both sites have buildings with distinctive chimneys that clearly identify them in drone footage as pyrolysis plants, said Taylor of the Tyre Recovery Association.  

“This is a pretty dismal picture,” he said. “It’s messy and filthy, there’s detritus everywhere, and it appears to have no emission controls at all. This kind of place should just not exist.” 

Nine Corporation’s owner, Group CNJ, and its founder Chetan Joshi, who chairs the All India Rubber and Tyre Recyclers Association that represents the sector to the Indian government, did not respond to requests for comment.  

Companies like Nine Corporation and CNJ don’t always operate pyrolysis themselves. Many tyres are traded by brokers, who turn a profit reselling them to fuel makers.

“Because there is a government restriction, people won’t admit who they are selling their tyres to,” said Shahid, a trader who did not wish to give his full name.

A consignment of tyres arriving from the UK tends to weigh between 100 and 500 tonnes and can fetch between £11,000 and £80,000 when resold. 

Dilshad Khan, a tyre broker, deals in tyres from Europe and the US: “UK, London, New York—I have many clients,” he said. “They call it black gold. Without putting money into it, you make money.”

Another trader, Rohit Jain, buys imported tyres despite lacking an import licence for his  pyrolysis plant a three-hour drive from Mumbai to make “carbon powder and pyrolysis oil”. 

Asked about the location of his plant, he said: “Wada.”

‘The government have to stop us’

Back in the UK, exporters also appear to be breaking the law when they dispose of waste tyres.

Larger tyre recyclers need permits from the Environment Agency. But smaller businesses often operate using a ‘T8 waste exemption licence’ that limits them to processing 40 tonnes a week. There are more than 1,000 registered licences, according to the most recent government data from 2022.

At one T8-licensed site in Castleton, Greater Manchester, two lorry loads left the premises in one day, apparently exceeding the weekly limit. Undercover calls to five other sites revealed four were handling more than 40 tonnes a week.

Asked where tyres go, the Castleton site owner said: “These tyres go to India. They do pyrolysis there, they make furnace oil.”

“There are plenty of people doing this,” he said. “Even if it’s illegal, the government have to stop us.”

Regulation of T8 licences is “frankly feeble” and has enabled many UK companies to export illegally high volumes without detection, said Taylor.

Billy Sheerin, a local councillor in Castleton, said residents, many of whom have family in India, would be shocked to learn about the “sinister” side to the UK’s used tyre industry.

“I thought the tyres were being taken away, chopped into crumbs and used for children’s play areas,” he said. “To find out this abuse is happening bang in my village—where’s our morals?” 

One tyre recycler, who asked not to be named, estimated that three out of four used UK tyres are going to India rather than to legitimate recycling—but said the British government was failing to act. An Environment Agency official told him in an email seen by SourceMaterial that “it is not within our powers to monitor a site outside of our jurisdiction”.

“It’s become a race to the bottom,” he said. “Unauthorised operators are using loopholes in the regulations, undercutting legitimate recyclers to the point where they make their businesses non-viable.”

Fighting Dirty, a campaign group, is challenging the government’s stance in court. Properly classifying used tyres as hazardous waste would activate much tighter export regulations, said Julia Eriksen, a solicitor at Leigh Day, the law firm representing the campaigners.

An environment department spokeswoman said: “We have strict controls in place for exporting waste tyres—including unlimited fines and jail time for anyone found to be illegally exporting tyre waste.”

There are also plans by a Norwegian company to keep more tyres in the UK by building a factory in Sunderland to turn them into jet fuel. 

But even with the best technology, pyrolysis fuel will always be dirtier than petrol or diesel, said Ramón Murillo, an academic who researches tyre processing. 

Another solution would be to ban exports of whole tyres and force operators to turn them into crumbed rubber. This “may prevent the illegal activity of moving them to pyrolysis plants” while boosting recycling in the UK, said Ajesh Jayaraj of SDR Innovations UK, a waste tyre shipper in Kent.

While Scotland went some way to addressing the problem by scrapping T8 licences in 2016, the rest of the UK hasn’t followed, said Taylor.

“There is an inertia at the heart of government,” he said. “The years roll by, we continue to receive these assurances, and the government doesn’t deliver.”

‘People are scared’

Around 2,000 pyrolysis plants are estimated to be operating in India, around half of them illegally.

Demand for pyrolysis oil—priced at around 40 rupees (£0.36) a kilogramme, two thirds of the price of conventional furnace oil—is driven mainly by cement and brick kiln operators, said Swati Singh Sambyal, a waste consultant in New Delhi.

Pyrolysis oil is often made even cheaper by diluting tyre oil with industrial solvent, said Omer Farooq, a trader.

“In cold weather furnace oil becomes thick and needs to be heated,” he said. “Tyre oil doesn’t have this issue—it’s always the consistency of water.”

With demand and import volumes so high, it is often cheaper to buy tyres shipped from abroad than source them locally, said Shahid, the trader.

Continuing demand has made the pyrolysis industry a powerful lobby and hampered efforts to limit its effect on health and the environment, according to Shiva Choudhary, who lives in a village in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. Plant operators threatened to have him arrested when he filed a court challenge against them, he said.  

“They have created an atmosphere that if you go against them, you can get into legal trouble,” he said. 

‘Constant coughing’

The day after the explosion in Wada, Kalpesh Patil used freedom of information laws to ask officials for copies of the permits for his village’s seven pyrolysis plants—including MD Pyrolysis, which ran the one that blew up. None had a licence—and only two had applied for one. 

MD Pyrolysis did not respond to requests for comment.

In November, India’s top environment court ordered an investigation into pyrolysis plants in other parts of the country “emitting poisonous gases and foul smells, leading to respiratory problems, eye irritation and other health issues”.

But illegal operators have simply begun releasing smoke at night to avoid detection, Patil said:

“They release the toxic gas when we are asleep. If you open the door, the house is filled with such a bad odour.” 

SourceMaterial and the BBC consulted scientists at Imperial College London who said that workers continually exposed to pyrolysis pollution are at risk of respiratory, cardiovascular and neurological diseases and certain types of cancer. Patil said his uncle’s buffalo had died after drinking from a stream polluted by wastewater from a pyrolysis plant. 

“Administrative officers are supposed to take care of people. But they don’t pay heed when we complain.”

Farmers in Wada showed SourceMaterial and the BBC young mangoes covered with soot dropping dead from the trees. Residents are regularly taken to hospital for itching eyes and throat problems, and solar panels won’t function as a layer of grime and oil smothers them.

“Kids are constantly coughing,” said one farmer, Manisha Patil. “If you can see so much dust on the trees, then imagine how much is going into our bodies.”

You can watch the BBC video story here and listen to the File on 4 Investigates documentary here.

Headline image: Workers at a waste tyre pyrolysis site in Uttar Pradesh (Shiva Choudhary)