Despite over 35,000 tonnes of tyres being disposed of here each year, Irish recyclers are facing a severe shortage of their raw materials
Cars, buses, lorries, tractors, trailers, motorcycles, aircraft, earth movers and bicycles all have one thing in common - they all have wheels, and those wheels need tyres.
When you consider this long list then the estimate of some 3.5 million tyres being on Irish roads at any one time does not seem to be overly exaggerated.
Although not defined as hazardous waste, tyres are nevertheless a serious environmental threat - if you have ever seen one burning on a bonfire then you will realise what a threat a heap of them are.
But what becomes of the hundreds of thousands of tyres that are scrapped every year and where do they eventually end up?
Well, silage pits seem to be account for a great number of them and some, but arguably not enough, make their way to the Crumb Rubber plant near Dundalk. "You will see tyres in a farmyard before you see any animals," observes Crumb's co-owner, Padraig Hand.
His company has four trucks on the road every week, collecting tyres from all over the country for re-cycling at its €4 million plant. But tyre re-cycling is still in its infancy in this country.
"Waste tyres are banned from farms in Northern Ireland and that is certainly not the case here. I reckon there are about 16,000 silage pits in the Republic and that is where a lot of tyres end up," adds Mr Hand.
Crumb Rubber charges €2 per tyre and the tyres are then brought back to its ultra-modern plant where they are ground down into tiny pieces.
These crumbs of rubber can then be used for all sorts of other purposes - filling for playground surfaces, as a surface in equestrian centres, as an alternative to bark for keeping weeds down in gardens, as rubber cobblelock, astro turf, and for other areas where such soft material can be used.
The National Waste Data Base points out that in America, Australia and Israel scrap tyres are being used in the construction of artificial reefs and could be used commercially for crab and lobster fisheries. They can also be used as landfill engineering material because they can be used to provide a drainage layer for leachate management at the base of a landfill.
Car tyres are made up of rubber, fibre and wire while truck tyres are made up of rubber and steel. They can be processed quickly at Crumb Rubber - at the rate of some 880 an hour or 8,000 over two shifts. Yet, despite the fact that the country is producing potential raw material for Mr Hand's plant by the tonne very day he says by the end of the month he will be out of tyres.
"The attitude of tyre sellers seems to be to get them off their premises as cheaply and as fast as they can. We charge €2 and others charge a lot less. We re-cycle them but others don't. It is a case of the cheapest man winning all the time," he says.
Farmers are using fewer tyres for holding down silage pits covers these days because of the popularity of baled silage, and last year it finally became illegal to dump tyres in landfill sites.
And yet Padraig Hand says his company is losing money and unable to generate the kind of volume he needs to stay in business.
The last offical figures for waste tyre generation in this country show that almost 35,000 tonnes of tyres were disposed of in 2001. Allowing for even a minimum increase of 5 per cent per annum that amounts to an awful lot of waste tyres not going to re-cycling facilities.