Old tyres are being recycled into road surfaces in a trial funded by Highways England to see if some of the 40 million treads scrapped each year in the UK can be reused.

A section between junctions 23 to 22 on the southbound carriageway of the M1 near Leicester has been laid with the surface in a new asphalt mix developed by Tarmac. It is estimated that up to 750 waste tyres could be used for every kilometre.

At the moment some 500,000 scrap tyres are exported for landfill, usually to the Middle East and Asia. There are more than seven million tyres filling one Kuwaiti landfill site alone which is so vast that the ‘tyre graveyard’ is now visible from space.

Martin Bolt, Corporate Group Leader, who oversees the project, said: “This trial could well be the first step to rapidly reducing the number of tyres piling up in the UK and beyond. The economic and environmental potential of this new asphalt is significant.”