David Rushbrooke is Chief Operating Officer of Tyreline Distributors, New Zealand distributor for Michelin and other brands.
From its main warehouse in Hamilton, Tyreline supplies retailers, fleets, agricultural contractors, mining customers and vehicle dealerships nationwide, bringing in more than 100,000 tyres a year, from passenger tyres to tyres for earthmovers.
Before Tyrewise, a disposal fee was charged at the end of a tyre’s life, usually by the retailer. “We would usually have a fair idea of the companies our customers were using to dispose of tyres, but we didn’t really know,” David says. “In some situations, those tyres were probably going into landfill.”
Now the fee is paid at import. The big change for Tyreline has been identifying every tyre that comes into the country and working out the correct fee based on ts tariff item classification, then helping customers charge it on correctly. Importers classified some tyres differently at first. “That all worked itself out over time. Now we generally all charge the same rate for a certain tyre, and if we don’t, our customers tell us pretty quickly.”
Today most customers have the fee loaded in their systems and it passes through automatically. “It’s pretty seamless.”
What David would tell an importer overseas is that the scheme has put real value into the end-of-life industry, with payment flowing from collection through to the new industries developing in New Zealand. “When a tyre comes off a car or a truck, there’s still a lot of raw material in it. If there’s value to somebody to process that, we can create new industries out of it.”