Elmore Recycling Ltd and Pennycove Limited go hand in hand

Growing up within the family business of Aidan Hand & Sons, and working at tyre repairs and fitting from a young age, Padraig Hand could always see the potential to recycle scrap tyres.

He introduced the technology to Ireland, which enabled the process to allow end of life waste tyres to be shredded and granulated into the separate valuable commodities of rubber granules and steel, establishing Crumb Rubber Limited back in 2002.

Crumb Rubber Limited was taken over by Bord na Mona in 2017 and moved to a new facility in Drogheda, Co. Louth, before employing Hand as operations manager for the plant, overseeing the daily processing of 10,000 passenger car and light commercial vehicle tyres. In 2024, Bord na Mona decided to exit the waste collection and recycling business.

Following this exit, Hand partnered with Francis Elmore of Elmore Recycling Limited in March 2025, to introduce a comprehensive waste tyre collection and processing facility to the market. The fusion of these two businesses brings together nearly 50 years of experience between them.

Hand and Elmore working on the ground and having a very hands-on approach to the business, ensures the ultimate efficiency of gaining their joint end goal of zero waste tyre recycling.

In 2002, Francis Elmore founded Elmore Recycling Limited with a single van on the road. Now 23 years later, his company has expanded to several vans, rigid trucks and self loading/walking floor rigid trucks with onboard weighers.

With the establishment this year of a Northern Ireland-based company, Elmore Recycling Limited now holds permits to collect waste tyres in all 32 counties. With a current weekly capacity of 400-tonnes, the business provides a nationwide collection service that can be organised to suit the needs of the client. By eliminating the need for tyre depot employees to load waste tyres into trailers, these self-loading trucks make considerably better use of their valuable staff time.

After collection, these end-of-life waste tyres are taken back to the Pennycove Limited Waste Facility in Drogheda, which has a capacity to process 45,000-tonnes of waste tyres annually. The site boasts three specially designed shredders as well as an in-house blade sharpening and maintenance workshop, keeping everything running as efficiently as possible.

The tyres are shredded down to 50mm for further processing and devulcanization and/or pyrolysis in facilities that are carefully chosen to comply with the company’s zero waste policies and goals.

The fusion of Elmore Recycling and Pennycove Limited brings together nearly 50 years of experience. They differ from other tyre collectors in that they can gather and shred all tyres, not just those from passenger cars and light commercial vehicles. From the biggest quarry/construction and agricultural tyres to the smallest, Elmore Recycling and Pennycove Limited have the equipment to lift and process them.

With the impending expansion of the Environmental Management Costs Scheme (EMC), the companies are interested in talking to anyone who has a backlog of tyres taking up valuable space on their site.