There are many end-market uses for waste tires. Some common ones are tire derived fuel, civil engineering applications, manufactured products, and pyrolysis. Scrap tires have been used as a supplemental fuel source in Japan, Europe, and the United States since the 1970s. Tire derived fuel or TDF is usually produced by cutting waste tires into small chips and removing the wire from them. These chips are then burned as a supplement to other fuels in cement kilns, lime kilns, paper mills, utility boilers, industrial boilers, iron foundries, and copper smelters.
Some kilns can burn whole waste tires which reduces or eliminates the costs of pre-processing.
TDF compares favorably to the burning of coal in every aspect except for higher zinc emissions. Civil engineering projects are markets that consume waste tires. Some applications include using tire chips as a fill to stabilize a hillside or slope that has been settling, as retaining wall backfill, as layered thermal insulation that can help reduce frost around basements, as a drainage aid on highway edges, and leachate liners for septic tanks and landfills. A. T. Knecht, Ph. The Scrap Tire Management Council estimated that the products market consumed roughly 15 million tires for 1996.