Certified: Recykl — How Poland’s Largest Tyre Recycler Turned Waste Into Building Materials

Every year, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 billion end-of-life tyres accumulate globally. They cannot be landfilled — they trap methane, harbour disease vectors, and are nearly indestructible. Burning them is toxic. Yet the rubber, steel and fibre they contain represent enormous embodied energy. A company based in the Polish town of Srem has made this problem its entire business — and now carries the certified proof of what that means for the environment.

The Scale of the Operation

Recykl Organizacja Odzysku S.A. is part of Grupa Recykl, the largest tyre recycling group in Central and Eastern Europe. With processing plants in Srem, Krosno Odrzanskie and Chelm, the group handles over 140,000 tonnes of waste tyres every year — roughly the combined annual tyre waste of several mid-size European countries. The scale is not incidental; it is the core of the environmental argument. Recycling at this volume requires systems, logistics and technology that smaller operators cannot sustain. It also creates enough output volume to supply genuine industrial markets.

The company collects tyres across Poland through a nationwide network, managing the legal obligation of producers and importers to recover their products. What comes in as waste leaves as material.

GREEN POWDER: Road-Ready Recycled Rubber

The mechanical recycling process at Recykl’s plants separates waste tyres into three streams: steel cord, textile fibre, and rubber. The rubber fraction — ground to fine particle sizes — becomes GREEN POWDER: a certified construction material and industrial input with a documented environmental profile.

GREEN POWDER finds its way into asphalt as a bitumen modifier, into sports surfaces and synthetic turf infill, into playground fall protection matting, and into specialist rubber-bound compounds. The critical question for any of these applications is: compared to the virgin alternative, does this material actually reduce environmental load? The EPD published under certificate EPD-P 06-10-2025 answers that question with data.

For specifiers, engineers and urban planners choosing between virgin and recycled rubber products, that data is not a marketing claim — it is a life-cycle assessment prepared to EN 15804 standards, independently verified and publicly available. It covers the material from the gate of the recycling facility through to product delivery, accounting for energy use, emissions and waste generated in the processing stage.

SMAPOL®: Recycled Rubber in the Asphalt Mix

The second certified product targets road construction directly. SMAPOL® is an additive for mineral-asphalt mixtures: crumb rubber powder incorporated into bituminous road surfaces during production. Roads built with rubber-modified asphalt have documented advantages — they are more elastic, resist cracking at low temperatures, and can reduce tyre-road noise by several decibels.

For the Polish road-building sector — which is both one of Europe’s largest by active investment volume and one increasingly subject to environmental procurement requirements — the availability of a product like SMAPOL® with a declared environmental performance (certificate EPD-P-07.10.2025) is significant. Public procurement directives increasingly require or reward environmental product declarations. Recykl has positioned SMAPOL® ahead of that curve.

What Certification Actually Measures

An Environmental Product Declaration does not certify that a product is „green.” It certifies that the environmental impact has been measured, reported transparently, and independently verified according to a recognised standard. The distinction matters. Without an EPD, a manufacturer can say „our recycled product is better for the environment.” With an EPD, they can say by how much, in which categories, and under what assumptions.

For recycled materials in particular, the EPD process forces a rigorous accounting that often reveals more nuance than simple „recycled = good” messaging. The environmental credit for diverting waste from landfill or incineration must be weighed against the energy consumed in the recycling process itself. Recykl’s certifications, issued by EPD Polska in October 2025, represent exactly this kind of transparent accounting.

The Wider Picture: Circular Economy at Scale

The European Green Deal and the Circular Economy Action Plan have placed material recovery at the centre of industrial policy. Tyres are one of the harder cases: mixed materials, engineered for durability, difficult to disassemble. The regulatory framework — Poland’s extended producer responsibility system, which Recykl helps implement — ensures that tyres do not disappear into informal channels.

What Recykl represents is the industrial-scale fulfilment of that policy intent. Processing 140,000 tonnes per year is not a pilot project or a CSR initiative. It is infrastructure. And with two EPD-certified products now in the market, the environmental performance of that infrastructure is no longer a matter of assumption — it is documented, comparable, and available for procurement decisions.

The next step for companies like Recykl is deeper integration into sustainable construction standards: green building rating systems that recognise recycled content, public procurement criteria that weight EPD-declared performance, and design specifications that explicitly call for certified recycled materials. The certifications issued in October 2025 are not the end of that journey. They are the beginning of a technical conversation the market is increasingly ready to have.

Recykl Organizacja Odzysku S.A. holds two EPD certifications issued by EPD Polska: GREEN POWDER (EPD-P 06-10-2025) and SMAPOL® additive for mineral-asphalt mixtures (EPD-P-07.10.2025). Both declarations are publicly available on EPDportal.org. Company profile: epdportal.org/producers/recykl…