The Sunderland Waste Tyre Processing Facility development is situated within the East Dock of the Port of Sunderland and is a former hydrocarbon tank farm.

Engineering construction specialist Technip has secured the job to build the new plant, which will have the capacity to process up to 73,000 tonnes of end-of-life tyres a year into around 24,000t of recovered carbon black (rCB) as well as up to 32,000t of liquid products, including liquid fuel.

Operator Norwegian-firm Wastefront said it would be the UK’s first “fully circular tyre-to-fuel plant” as it is able to refine used tyres into oil, and then sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

Facilities like Wastefront’s planned Sunderland plant are critical to meeting the UK’s SAF mandate, which came into effect on 1 January 2025, requiring at least 10% of all jet fuel used in flights departing the UK to come from sustainable feedstocks by 2030, rising to 22% by 2040.

Vianney Valès, CEO of Wastefront, said the plant will be built in phases, starting with one module producing 8,000 tonnes of oil annually and eventually expanding to four modules with a total capacity of 32,000 tonnes per year.

By 2030, Wastefront plans to operate four large-scale plants, collectively producing 128,000 tonnes of oil annually.

This will feed into a centralised SAF facility capable of converting 70% of this oil into SAF, yielding approximately 90,000 tonnes of SAF per year.