For five years, there was a massive pile of end-of-life tyres at 8 Starta Street, Čiekurkalns. The site has finally been cleared. As Atis Treijs, Director of the Waste Management Department at the State Environmental Service, reports, the land was purchased, as a result of which the tyres became the property of the company that later carried out their removal.
A. Treijs stresses that amendments to regulations, recently introduced and aimed at cleaning up such sites, have had a positive impact on the management and removal of historically accumulated tyres. Specifically, in order to reduce the stockpiles of end-of-life tyres, it has been decided to increase the targets for tyre recycling and recovery. By 2025, it is planned to gradually increase the collection target for end-of-life tyres from 65% in 2021 to 90% of the volume placed on the market annually by 2025, so that almost all sold tyres are recycled after they reach the end of their service life.
A total of 1,200 tonnes of end-of-life tyres were removed from 8 Starta Street to a nearby site. As Uldis Skrebs, owner of SIA 3R, reveals, there were several legal aspects that had to be resolved, since the landowner was one party, while the tyre holder was another. "By involving producer responsibility systems, it was possible to find the funding so that those abandoned tyres could finally be removed and recycled," notes U. Skrebs.