Kentucky's Tyre Recycling Numbers: The Good News With a Catch

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-09-05 — Waste360 (recycling/scrap)

Kentucky recycled 77.4% of its waste tyres in 2025. That's the number everyone will talk about. And fair enough — it's respectable.

Except.

The rate actually slipped slightly from 78.2% the year before, which is the sort of thing that usually goes unremarked in press releases. Nobody gets excited about a decline. But it matters if you're paying attention, especially in a market where pressure is building and options are tightening.

Let me back up. In 2025, Kentucky generated roughly 59,100 tonnes of waste tyres — call it 4.2 million passenger tyres in tangible terms. The state's Waste Tire Trust Fund Annual Report tracks where all of this ends up. Seventy-seven percent got recycled into something useful. The remaining 22.6% went to landfill, and that proportion grew from the previous year.

Ground rubber dominated the end markets, accounting for nearly 30% of recycled material. Makes sense. It's the workhorse of tyre recycling — you can turn it into playground surfaces, asphalt additives, rubberised mulch, that sort of thing. Straightforward demand, at least in normal years.

But here's where it gets thin. Traditional markets for recycled tyre material are under real strain. Nothing dramatic or sudden, mind you — more or less a steady squeeze on margins and a shrinking number of buyers willing to commit long-term. The report itself flagged this. Ground rubber works fine until it doesn't, which is to say until someone develops a cheaper alternative or the market simply saturates.

Diversification sounds like business jargon, and it is, but it's also describing something concrete: you need new outlets, new end uses, new industries willing to take material that's been ground or shredded or chemically broken down. That's harder than it sounds.

The recycling rate itself remains solid. Not great, not terrible. But watching it tick backwards year-on-year is the sort of small signal that tends to precede bigger problems.

Source: "Kentucky recycled 77.4% of its waste tyres in 2025, according to the state's Waste Tire Trust Fund Annual Report" — Tyre and Rubber Recycling

Tags: metal scrap recycling industry