BLUE Circle Cement has applied for planning permission to build a storage facility for tyres at its Westbury site, even though the Environment Agency has yet to decide whether the firm can go ahead with using scrap tyres as fuel for its kilns.

The company has also announced this week that it has joined forces with Michelin Tyre plc to form a joint venture, Sapphire Energy Recovery, to prepare tyres for use as fuel.

Blue Circle has nine plants around the country, five of which may be using tyres as fuel in the future.

The application to use tyres at the Westbury site was made in June, but a decision is not expected until next year.

A spokesman for Blue Circle said this week: "We are very hopeful that Westbury will be one of those sites at which tyres will be used as fuel."

The company ran tyre-burning trials between March and November last year.

It maintains that the results show that switching to tyres rather than using more traditional fuels will reduce potentially harmful emissions from the plant as well as conserving fossil fuels.

There is a worldwide problem with tyre disposal. Forty million tyres are scrapped each year, more than a quarter of which either go into landfill sites or are illegally dumped or fly-tipped.

New European legislation means that whole tyres will be banned from landfill sites by 2003, chipped tyres by 2006.

Chipped tyres have been used as fuel at the Blue Circle's plant in Cauldon, Staffordshire, for the past five years.

Trials have been carried out in Dunbar and are currently running at a plant in Derbyshire.

Blue Circle's plans have raised strenuous objections from local people.

Westbury-based environmental group, The Air that We Breathe, brought in independent experts to assess the situation in September.

All the experts warned that tyre-burning could potentially cause serious harm to public health.

David Levy, chair of The Air that We Breathe, said of Blue Circle's planning application: "I feel that this is a particularly arrogant move, especially when so many questions have been raised about the way the trials have been conducted."

"I find it astounding that they can totally disregard their own comments that if there were any health risks associated with the process, they would withdraw their application to burn tyres."