Support Tyre Retreading and Save Environment Karun Sanghi, MD, Tyresoles India Pvt Ltd Tyre retreading industry is essentially a tyre recycling process. In western countries, tyres cannot be put in landfills and must be recycled in various ways. The government offers numerous incentives to recyclers who dispose off these wornout tyres. In India, the tyre retreading industry does not receive any tax incentives but is, instead, burdened by numerous taxes like VAT, Service tax and Excise. VAT is levied on the material used in the retreading. This apart, service tax is charged on retreading, so much so that the service tax is also being claimed on the material component over and above VAT. In addition, the raw material input for the retreading is subjected to excise duty of 16% along with educational cess and higher secondary educational cess. To help protect the environment, it is necessary that the Government supports and incentives the retreading of tyres. The first step could be an exemption from all of these taxes for the retreading industry. Many retreaders have gone one step further and now use boilers fired with agrowaste, thereby completely eliminating the use of all fossil fuels in the retreading process. A number of companies have taken the recycled business even further and created recycled rubber flooring manufacturing facility, using meshed granular rubber crumbs from tyres that cannot be retreaded, thus completing avoiding the hazardous waste. When a truck tyre is retreaded it results in a saving of 20 Itrs of crude oil. There is an estimated 100 lakhs tyres retreaded every year in our country. Isn’t it astonishing that 200 million litres of crude oil is saved in a year?