The plant uses a technique called vacuum pyrolysis to incinerate tyres and break them down into carbon, pyrolysis oil and gas.

The recycling plant has so far absorbed 1.5 million levs (£528,000) of investment, said Yavor Stanchev, sales director at Ecoprocess. The plants recycling capacity of 25 tons of tyres per day should be achieved by mid-2006, he added.

Ecoprocess has asked the state-run Enterprise for Environment Activities Management to subsidise the cost of transporting disused tyres to the recycling plant. Bulgaria is estimated to produce 60,000 tons of used automobile tyres each year, Bulgarian newspaper Dnevnik reported.