Fire detection for tyre recycling sites

Last updated 30 October 2026. End-of-life tyres are one of the hardest combustible wastes to deal with once they catch fire. They burn hot, give off thick black smoke and oily run-off, and can smoulder for days. This page explains what the Environment Agency (EA) and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) ask of tyre recycling yards, tyre storage depots and shredding sites, what is changing for the T8 waste exemption in 2027, and how camera smoke and fire detection fits into your fire prevention plan (FPP).

Why do tyre recycling sites catch fire?

Most tyre site fires start in one of a handful of ways, and your FPP needs a control for each. The EA’s fire prevention plans guidance lists the common causes of fire on waste sites, and the HSE’s guidance on spontaneous heating of piled tyre shred and rubber crumb adds the risks that are specific to processed rubber:

• Arson and vandalism. Whole tyres are easy to light and hard to put out. Yards that are fenced but empty at night need security that keeps working when the gate is locked.
• Hot works. Grinding, cutting and welding on plant or steel need a permit to work and a fire watch afterwards.
• The shredder and other plant. Friction, worn parts and hot surfaces on shredders, conveyors and loading shovels are a common source of heat, and rubber dust and fibre collect around them.
• Self-heating. Tyre shred and crumb are porous and have a large surface area, so piles of them can heat up on their own. The HSE notes that rusting exposed wire and contamination add to the risk.
• Nearby heat sources. The HSE asks operators to keep heat sources away from piles and to consider shading or enclosing them.

Five ignition routes

Several of these routes share one thing: the fire starts when nobody is watching. That is why the detection section of a tyre site FPP has to cover the hours when the site is closed as well as working hours. Our waste site fire risk assessment guide walks through how to assess each area of a site.

Why are tyre fires so hard to put out?

A burning pile of tyres is very different from a burning pile of paper or wood. The HSE says that once a fire in tyre shred or crumb is established, applying water or foam in situ is generally ineffective and can make things worse by creating oily run-off. Its advice is that the first priority is to separate unburned material from the fire, and it warns that people nearby can be exposed to smoke containing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and sulphur oxides.

That has two consequences for your plan. First, the fire needs to be found while it is still small enough to pull unburnt tyres away from it. Second, you need the space, plant and people to do that, at any hour. A fire that is only noticed when the smoke plume is visible from the road has usually gone past that point.

Fire and rescue services know how long these incidents can last. In August 2022 Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service reported a fire at an industrial site in Ranskill where thousands of tyres were alight, producing a large plume of black smoke. Crews were called at 10.23am, there were 14 fire engines at the scene by late afternoon, and five days later crews were still there creating fire breaks. Incidents like this are why regulators put so much weight on keeping piles small, keeping them apart and finding fires early.

What are the EA rules for storing tyres?

If your permit requires a fire prevention plan, the EA guidance sets out the standard measures. It treats tyres and rubber as one waste type, covering whole tyres, baled tyres, and tyre shred, crumb and fibre. Its general principle is that waste should be stored in its largest form, because whole tyres are less prone to self-heating than shred or crumb.

On top of the pile sizes, the guidance sets a maximum height of 4 metres and a maximum length or width of 20 metres for all piles, and a separation distance of at least 6 metres between piles and from the site boundary, buildings and other combustible materials. It notes that waste with a higher calorific value, which includes tyres, may need greater separation distances or fire walls. Fire walls must give at least 120 minutes of fire resistance and stand at least 1 metre higher than the waste beside them.

Plan view

The guidance also says waste should not be stored for more than 6 months, that it should be rotated on a first in, first out basis, and that piles kept at the maximum size for more than 3 months need extra measures such as temperature monitoring. If you store waste in a building, you must have a suppression system as well as detection.

Yard by day

Many smaller tyre sites in England operate under the SR2021 No 13 standard rules for storing and mechanically treating end-of-life tyres for recovery. These allow up to 5,000 tonnes of tyres a year, with no more than 100 tonnes on site at any time and nothing kept for longer than 3 months. Treatment has to happen indoors, apart from manual sorting of casings, though tyres may be stored outside. The rules require all waste to be kept secure so that members of the public cannot get to it, and they require you to take all appropriate measures to prevent fires, with a fire prevention plan if the EA tells you your site is a fire risk.

Is the T8 exemption for tyres ending?

Yes, in England. The T8 exemption for mechanically treating end-of-life tyres currently lets you bale, shred or cut tyres on a smaller scale without a permit: up to 60 tonnes of truck tyres or 40 tonnes of other tyres over any 7 days, kept in piles of no more than 10 tonnes with a gap between them as a fire break. In its policy paper Reforming the waste exemptions system (15 July 2025), Defra said that given the fire risk from storing tyres, and evidence that exemption limits are being exceeded by significant amounts, it had decided to remove the T8 exemption.

GOV.UK’s page on waste exemptions: new rules from January 2027 (updated 21 October 2026) sets out the timetable. The reforms are expected to be approved before 17 December 2026 and come into force from 6 January 2027, and T8 will be withdrawn on 6 April 2027. If you need to keep treating tyres after that, you will need an environmental permit, and GOV.UK says you should apply before T8 ends. You can carry on operating while the application is being processed.

From exemption to permit

Defra’s paper also makes clear that tyre fitters and garages storing their own waste tyres before collection are not affected; they are covered by separate storage arrangements. For operators moving from T8 to a permit, the fire prevention plan is usually the biggest piece of new work, and detection is one of the sections the EA looks at most closely. Our fire prevention plan checklist lists everything a plan needs.

How does tyre shred and crumb self-heat?

The HSE explains that experience suggests auto-ignition normally happens in stockpiles more than 3 metres deep, and that finer shred is more susceptible. Piles deeper than about 1 metre can still heat up and ignite over long periods, measured in weeks. Because the heat builds inside the pile, the signs at the surface are subtle: a slight sulphurous smell, a haze of condensation coming from vents in the pile, or oil in the drainage water. The HSE adds that a smouldering fire can turn into a flaming one when it reaches the surface or when the pile is disturbed, for example when a loading shovel starts to dig into it.

Inside the pile

The HSE’s list of controls is practical: remove fines and metal, limit pile size, manage moisture, rotate stock, monitor temperature below the surface, turn piles that are heating, provide shading or enclosure, and keep heat sources away. None of these is a camera job, and a camera cannot see heat building deep inside a pile. What a camera can do is watch the surface of every pile and the shredder area, all the time, for the smoke and flame that appear when heating breaks through.

Shredder hall at night

What fire detection does a tyre site need?

Section 13 of the EA guidance says you must have procedures to detect a fire in its early stages, and your plan must show how the detection system raises the alarm both during working hours and when the site is closed. It must be proportionate to your activities and risks, and it can be automated or manual. The examples of appropriate automated systems are smoke and heat detectors including temperature probes, CCTV visual flame detection systems, and spark, infrared and ultraviolet detection. Design, installation and maintenance must be covered by an appropriate third-party certification scheme such as UKAS or meet a recognised standard, such as a British Standard; if neither applies, you must show you can still meet the three objectives of the plan. Our guide to EA fire prevention plan detection requirements covers this section in full.

Those three objectives are to minimise the likelihood of a fire, to aim for any fire to be extinguished within 4 hours, and to minimise the spread of fire within the site and to neighbouring sites. For tyres, which are hard to extinguish, the second and third objectives depend heavily on how early the fire is found.

For a tyre site, no single method covers everything, because the risks show up in different places:

• Heat inside shred and crumb piles builds slowly and out of sight, so the HSE recommends sub-surface temperature monitoring, and the EA lists it among the extra measures for piles kept at maximum size for more than 3 months.
• Smoke and flame appear at the surface, on a row of whole tyres, at the shredder, by the fence or in a skip of rejects, often at night. A camera watching the yard sees all of these at once.
• People who should not be there are the start of an arson attack. Fence and gate alerts after closing give you a chance to act before anything is lit.

Four layers

Indoor shredding halls need the same thinking. The EA requires suppression as well as detection when waste is stored in a building, and the detection still has to raise the alarm when the building is empty.

How do you catch a fire after the site has closed?

Most tyre yards are busy in the day and empty at night. A fire watch at close-down covers the period straight after the shredder stops. For the rest of the night, you need something that keeps watching and tells a person straight away, and something that warns you when someone climbs the fence.

Fence at dusk

With camera detection, each row of tyres, each bale block, the shredder and the quarantine area can be its own detection zone. When smoke or flame appears in a zone, the alert goes to the duty keyholder’s phone with a short clip, so they can see what is happening before they set off. Email alerts go to the wider duty list, and an alarm receiving centre (ARC) or call alerts can be added for sites where nobody is on call overnight. Our out-of-hours site security checklist covers the security side of a closed site.

How quickly do you need to respond?

The EA guidance requires a quarantine area that can hold at least 50% of the volume of your largest pile, with 6 metres of separation around it, and says you must be able to move waste into it as soon as possible or, at most, within 1 hour of a fire starting. That hour only starts to work for you if somebody knows about the fire. Detection that only works while staff are on site is not enough for a yard that is empty all night.

First smoke to contained

Write the response into the plan with names, roles and travel times: who receives the alert, who goes to site, how they get in, which plant they use to pull tyres away from the fire, where the quarantine area is, and how firewater will be contained. The EA asks for water supplies that can deliver what is needed to fight a fire, and for details of the firefighting resources you have on site, day and night. Our FPP detection template helps you set this out. If your site is in Wales, see our guide to NRW fire prevention plan detection.

Where does Woodcock AI fit at a tyre site?

Woodcock AI turns the CCTV you already have into AI smoke and fire detection. It connects to your existing cameras or recorder over ONVIF or RTSP, so the cameras that already overlook your rows, bales and shredder can start watching for smoke and flame without being replaced.

• Polygon detection areas. Draw a shape that follows the edge of each row, bale block, shred pile or quarantine bay, so every alert names the area on your FPP site plan. See polygon detection zones.
• Self-learning, fitted to each scene. Each camera’s model is fitted to its own view and learns from that site’s normal footage, which matters in a yard full of dark rubber, floodlight glare, rain and moving plant. Read about our self-learning AI.
• Years of development, in use today. Woodcock AI has been developed over several years and runs on real UK waste and industrial sites.
• Alerts that reach a keyholder. App alerts with a clip and email as standard, with an alarm receiving centre (ARC) and call alerts as optional add-ons. Per-camera schedules keep smoke and fire detection on around the clock, with intrusion or line-crossing alerts on the fence once the site is closed.
• Records for your plan. Each alert keeps its time, area and clip, and we run smoke tests on site at commissioning so you have evidence that the system works on your cameras.

Camera detection does not replace temperature monitoring of shred and crumb piles, and it does not replace a life-safety fire alarm or the suppression a building needs. It adds a layer that watches the whole yard, all night, and tells someone straight away. For how it works in detail, see our AI smoke and fire detection camera page and our guide to video smoke detection on existing CCTV. For other waste sites, see AI CCTV for waste and recycling, wood recycling yards and waste transfer stations.

Which sources is this page based on?

• GOV.UK, Environment Agency, Fire prevention plans: environmental permits (last updated 11 January 2021; checked 30 October 2026).
• GOV.UK, Environment Agency, SR2021 No 13: storage and mechanical treatment of end-of-life tyres for recovery (updated 12 February 2026).
• GOV.UK, Waste exemption T8: mechanically treating end-of-life tyres (last updated 21 October 2026).
• GOV.UK, Waste exemptions: new rules from January 2027 (updated 21 October 2026).
• GOV.UK, Defra, Reforming the waste exemptions system (15 July 2025).
• Health and Safety Executive, Spontaneous heating of piled tyre shred and rubber crumb (page updated 24 February 2025).
• Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service, Fire on industrial site in Ranskill (5 August 2022, with later updates).
• WISH Forum, WASTE 28: Reducing fire risk at waste management sites (issue 3, March 2020).

We have summarised these documents in our own words. Always read the current versions and follow your permit. This page is general guidance, not legal or regulatory advice; your regulator decides what is acceptable for your site.

Frequently asked questions

Last reviewed 30 October 2026