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This week started early—at 3am to be precise. Despite being
Page 46
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man6 aging director of a small tyre breakdown company with three vans uc, and four employees, I take my turn along with everyone else to do
the call-outs In the early hours.
y I pride myself on the fact that my company offers a faster
.0 response in the Hampshire-Wiltshire area than any of my competi, E. tors, and we are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
E. With 20 years in the tyre business-10 of them running my own o company—I know how important good service is to customers and how important it is to retain good reliable staff. My staff know I won't ask them to do anything I wouldn't be prepared to do myself. So this morning it was my turn to drag myself out of bed, drive to my yard in Romsey, pick up a tyre, drive to the M3 at Winchester and change a blown tyre on a Sprinter belonging to a document courier service. The van was on its way within 45 minutes of making the call.
The rest of the day is spent sending out invoices and catching up with paperwork.
TUESDAY
Although 90% of Fastrax work involves commercial vehicles, we also offer a car, agricultural and industrial tyre service. With both the other fitters tied up with HGV blow-outs on the motorway, it's left to me to deal with the operator of a waste transfer station who phones to say his loading shovel has punctured a tyre.
This is one of my regular call-outs. Skip trucks and tippers tip on to a concrete surface and the loading shovel then loads the waste onto bulkers to go to landfill. Because the surface is concrete, if the shovel runs over a scrap of jagged waste, the concrete tends to push the fragment into the tyre, rather than the tyre pushing the scrap into the soil. I repair the puncture on this machine about once a fortnight. It's hard work but it pays well. The wheels are off and on so often that the nuts don't have time to seize up.
WEDNESDAY
I have to stay in the office to meet a rep who is going to try to sell me a tyre-shredding machine. If I decide to buy it, it will be a massive investment. Disposal of scrap tyres is a major worldwide problem. Most of my scrap tyres are picked up by a company that supplies them to a cement company to fire its kiln: it costs an arm and a leg to have them taken away. I keep getting circulars from the Environment Agency telling me I should recycle them by having them retreaded. Haven't these people ever seen a tyre that's blown on a 44-tonnerP You can't always find all the bits—and very often the wheel's a write-off as well.
THURSDAY
I'm spending another day trying to solve my tyre disposal problem. I'm wondering if the economics of shredding tyres adds up. EC regulations state that whole tyres can be landfilled up to July 2003 and shredded tyres up to July 2006. Then they can only be legally disposed of by incineration and used for the manufacture of tyre crumb. The problem is there aren't many tyre incinerators, and demand for tyre crumb is miniscule.
In the afternoon I have a visit from a Ghanaian tyre importer who is buying second hand casings for the African market. He sends two or three containers a month to Africa.
FRIDAY
A day off at last. My staff should be able to deal with everything today but I keep my mobile with me at all times just in case there are call-outs they can't deal with. I can't even look forward to Saturday and Sunday off as I've agreed to cover for one of the fitters. No one said it would be easy.