The T8 exemption, and what it does and does not allow

T8 is one of the Environment Agency's registered waste exemptions. According to the Environment Agency's guidance on GOV.UK, it allows end-of-life tyres to be treated for recovery by baling, shredding, peeling, shaving, granulating or re-treading, and allows already shredded or granulated tyres to be granulated again, which must be done indoors.

The waste codes it covers are 16 01 03, end-of-life tyres, and 19 12 04 for shredded or granulated end-of-life tyres only. Those codes come from the List of Wastes, the classification system a transfer note uses to describe what is being moved.

An exemption is registered with the Environment Agency rather than applied for as a permit. The guidance places T8 in the Upper charging band, so there is a charge to register it.

The guidance is specific: you can store or treat 60 tonnes of truck tyres, or 40 tonnes of any other tyres, over any 7-day period. It is a rolling weekly figure covering storage and treatment together, not an annual allowance and not a figure that resets whenever it suits.

There is a second condition alongside it that is easy to miss and matters enormously in practice: within the 7-day limit, tyres must be stored in piles no bigger than 10 tonnes, with a gap acting as a fire break between each pile. Anyone who has seen a tyre fire understands why that condition exists.

Operating above those limits is not a T8 activity at all. The guidance is explicit that treating more than the exemption allows requires an environmental permit instead.

T8 covers tyres and nothing else. The guidance states you cannot treat any waste other than end-of-life tyres or shredded and granulated end-of-life tyres under it, and cannot treat hazardous waste under it. It also states that sorting tyres cannot be carried out under T8 as an associated prior treatment where T8 is registered.

An exemption is also not a carrier registration. A business that treats tyres under T8 and also collects them from garages needs registration as a waste carrier as well — they answer different questions, and holding one says nothing about the other.

A good deal of trade conversation concerns whether T8 will be withdrawn or tightened, usually in the context of waste tyres being exported or accumulated at sites operating nominally under exemption. Reform of the waste exemptions regime has been discussed publicly for several years.

What we will not do is tell you it has happened. As at the date at the foot of this page, the Environment Agency's own T8 guidance describes a live exemption and sets out the conditions above. If and when that guidance changes, this page changes with it. Where a change would affect your operation, the guidance page itself is the thing to watch, not a summary of it on someone else's website.

For a garage, T8 changes nothing about your own obligations. Storing the tyres you generate yourself pending collection is a separate matter from treating other people's tyres, and your duty of care runs to describing the waste accurately and handing it to an authorised person.

Where it is worth knowing about is in conversation. A collector who tells you they process tyres themselves is describing an activity that needs either a registered exemption with real tonnage limits or a permit — and the scale they describe is a reasonable thing to ask about.