As part of the Clean Up the World campaign run in partnership with Legambiente, EcoTyre collected 218,990 kg of ELTs – End-of-Life Tyres – across 24 pick-ups in 9 regions, recovering more than 29,000 individual tyres.
Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata and Piedmont were the most active territories, with roughly 43,000 kg of ELTs collected in each region, followed by Molise, Campania, Lazio, Lombardy and Sardinia.
The partnership with Clean Up the World sits within the wider "PFU Zero" project, which is endorsed by the Italian Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security and was set up to inform the public about the existence and the effectiveness of the ELT recovery and management chain.
The tyres gathered during Clean Up the World 2024 make a significant contribution to "From Rubber to Rubber", the project coordinated by EcoTyre with the involvement of many Italian companies. Thanks to this work, rubber obtained directly from ELTs can now be used to manufacture new tyres and a range of other rubber products, from appliance seals to eco-friendly asphalt, from piping to electrical cable sheathing.
"Our partnership with Legambiente on the Clean Up the World project continues to deliver, and this year it reached its twelfth anniversary. We opened the season with a major event on the circular economy in Nizza di Sicilia, raising awareness of the measures needed to prevent waste being dumped in the environment and to ensure its recovery and valorisation, with particular reference to end-of-life tyres," comments Enrico Ambrogio, President of EcoTyre.
"This well-established collaboration has allowed our local branches to step in where tyre dumping had reached serious proportions, ensuring not only that the tyres were removed but, above all, that they were properly valorised," says Laura Brambilla, Head of Legambiente's national Clean Up the World campaign. "We see this partnership as an important tool for communication and for drawing attention to illegal dumping and the environmental decay that follows — the very themes at the heart of this thirty-year-old Legambiente campaign, and the reason for its success."