New tyre scheme stops millions of tyres from being dumped in first year

Thursday, 20 November 2025

The Tyrewise product stewardship scheme set up to collect tyres to avoid them being dumped has collected 36,801 tonnes of tyres in its first full year of operation, which it says is the equivalent to 4.6 million passenger car tyres.

It was a defining moment for New Zealand, said Adele Rose, chief executive of 3R, which runs the Tyrewise scheme.

“After 13 years of development, we’ve successfully launched our nation’s first regulated product stewardship scheme for end-of-life tyres.”

Tyrewise’s first annual report for the 12-month period to the end of March has just been published on Thursday.

The scheme collected $32 million in levies on imported tyres in its first full financial year. One council - Palmerston North - had seen tyre dumping decrease by 47%, and it had been spending $200,000 to $300,000 each year on clearing dumped material, including tyres.

Until Tyrewise was established, New Zealand imported tyres without careful planning for what would be done with them at the end of their useful lifetimes.

Some ended up being exported to Pacific islands for use on vehicles after they were deemed no longer safe in New Zealand. Others were burnt, dumped, or in rare cases, recycled into other things like mobility ramps and soft surfacing for playgrounds.

But the success of Tyrewise, which is paid for by a small levy on each tyre imported, has not been matched by the roll-out of other stewardship schemes to deal responsibility with the waste from other imported goods like electronics, textiles and plastic.

There has been a dulling of ambition on product stewardship since the change of government two years ago, and cuts at the Ministry for the Environment (MFE), which had seen Australia pulling further ahead towards a less-polluting, more circular economy, according to Rose.

She said Australia’s productivity commission had produced a far more ambitious plan than a five-page strategy document that scaled down the ambitions of the previous government.

“There’s a bit of a misconception that it (product stewardship schemes) increases the cost of living. It doesn’t. It decreases it,” she said.

While the tyre levy did add cost, Rose saw that as a simple cost transference as it had seen the costs of dealing with the widespread illegal dumping of tyres, including landfill use, plummet for council ratepayers.

In 2020, the Labour government announced six priority products that needed stewardship schemes to more responsibly manage the waste they produced: tyres, refrigerant gases, plastic packaging, agrichemicals and their containers, electronic waster, and farm plastics.

While progress had been made on all, only Tyrewise was up and running as a fully-fledged functioning product stewardship scheme.

However, Rose said 3R was close to close to launch with a large battery stewardship scheme with industry, and the refrigerant scheme was also progressing.

The other schemes had been designed, she said.

There had also been work done on a textile waste scheme proposal by the domestic fashion industry, inspired by a scheme in place in Australia. Currently, around 52,000 tonnes of textiles end up in landfills in New Zealand.

Progress was being hampered by reduced capacity in MFE as a result of government cuts, Rose said.

The Tyrewise scheme has tidied up tyre waste, but it has not removed the impact on the environment because collected tyres need trucking to processing sites, and most of the tyres collected by Tyrewise were burnt as tyre-derived fuel by Fletcher Building’s Golden Bay Cement.

That had reduced Golden Bay Cement’s dependency on burning coal, and reduced the carbon cost of its cement.

A little less than a third of tryes collected by Tyrewise were exported, but Rose expected that to change as more would be used as an ingredient in materials for roading.