Riding Into New Markets

As spring gardens come into bloom and people begin to emerge from the indoor winter season, the annual tradition of mulching and planting flowers is part of the process. And while many home owners with green thumbs will be loading up trucks with bags of mulch, soil and peat moss, something new this year could be included: bits of scrap tires.

Several processes are being used to take scrap tires and turn them into a new product—including landscaping mulch—in an attempt to both reduce the exorbitant number of scrap tires generated and to find profitable ways to recycle them.

Some of these new techniques and products could help create a second life for a material that landfill owners have a surplus of and state officials are putting considerable thought into how to get rid of and create profitable business opportunities in the process.

MAKING SOMETHING OLD INTO SOMETHING NEW

Lee Greenberg is one of those people finding a new way to help reduce the amount of scrap tires while also creating a business opportunity. He is converting scrap tires into a product called Rubberific Mulch, a mulch made out of scrap tires that is said to last eight to 10 years, instead of the one-year life span that traditional wood mulch has. Greenberg, vice president of Green Edge Enterprises, St. Louis, takes shreded tires and uses a patented process to apply a color coating on the shredded fragments.

“We access scrap tires and rubber buffings from tire retreaders, and get it to the right size and shape, then put our coating on it that will last anywhere from eight to 10 years,” Greenberg says. “It is a permanent mulch. For home use it is very neat. Bugs and termites hate this rubber so they don’t get attracted to it and they leave the area. I think it makes a lot of sense.”

Greenberg says that demand for the product has “gone through the roof” since the company began a limited marketing campaign for the mulch. Currently the mulch, available in St. Louis and surrounding areas, is being sold at Lowe’s and Home Depot, as well as at several other retail outlets.

The product is being accepted by the playground industry readily, he says. He also says that the mulch is good for use at home because bugs such as termites, that traditionally have plagued homeowners, don’t like the rubber mulch and are repelled from the area.

The raw material to make the mulch, scrap tires, is available in abundance. It is shipping costs that limit the marketing range of the product. Localizing the processing of the tires into mulch could help reduce costs.

Greenberg and partner Judy Smith note that the company has successfully made arrangements with entrepreneurs and recyclers in other parts of the country to use the GreenEdge process, and that they are looking for other distributors or recyclers interested in bringing the mulch product to new regional markets.

THE GRASS CAN ALWAYS BE GREENER

Keeping a lawn or sports field green and without patches of dead grass from heavy traffic can always be a chore. A product made from scrap tires is among those helping keep turf surfaces in better shape. Crumb rubber is being used in a lawn application as a “top dressing” for turf.

The ground up scrap tires, being marketed by several companies, including JaiTire Industries, can be worked into the thatch, the company says, and then the product acts as a cushion for the crown of the turfgrass plant, helping to prevent damage in heavy traffic areas.

A layer of one half inch to ¾ of an inch can protect both the grass and athletes playing on the field by providing more of a cushion and keeping the grass from being damaged at the same time, says Corny Snyder, president of JaiTire Industries, Denver. Crown III, JaiTire’s crumb rubber product, is mainly being marketed toward golf courses and uses in athletic fields. “We have found about 15% of golf courses are using the product,” Snyder says. “Our largest market is municipal athletic fields because the municipal purchasing person will usually use a new product.”

Snyder says the crumb rubber is in very small pieces, about the size of rice grains, and is put on top of the grass and eventually works its way into the turf. The result is the grass is kept from being crushed because the rubber acts as a protector against heavy wear and tear.

She says the product is very popular in England, with 37 of the top 100 golf courses using Crown III. What makes crumb rubber applications such as Crown III different from other scrap tire recycling ventures is that they are actually making money. “This product has marketing [power] and probably has the best profit margin of any crumb rubber product,” she says.

Crown III is manufactured out of Denver, and when orders are received from well outside the region, material is bought from local processors, Snyder says of the scrap tires used to make the product.

Crown III and its turf-oriented crumb rubber counterparts began at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich., where the possible benefits of using crumb rubber were researched. The patent to use crumb rubber as a top dressing was awarded to Michigan State in April 1997, and the university has been working with JaiTire on research and distribution.

Snyder says the markets for Crown III have been good internationally, including in Columbia, Saudi Arabia and Norway, with a German dealer also reporting success.

A CIVIL (ENGINEERING) ACTION

John Serumgard of the Scrap Tire Management Council, Washington, says Crown III and like applications are creating a new category of applications for scrap tires that is not being addressed in the market anywhere else. “It truly is a unique application,” the trade association’s executive vice president says. Civil engineering applications for scrap tires are also increasing, he says.

Finding civil engineering applications for the existing piles of scrap tires is one way to help reduce the amount of tires, he says. Scrap tires can also be used in leachate layers at the bottoms of new cells at landfills. It could be possible to consume up to a million scrap tires in one landfill, Serumgard says. “It isn’t a high tech application, but it does conserve sand or gravel or whatever the alternative method is. And it helps solve a solid waste problem.”

One more application for scrap tires is using them in septic system leaching applications. Serumgard says that depending on what part of the country one is in, rock may not be plentiful or it may be somewhat expensive while scrap tires can fill the need. And some of the advantages of using scrap tires instead of gravel are that it is a lighter product to move and transport and it tends not to damage the ground as much as gravel or rock. Using scrap tires in this application can be especially useful in areas such as Florida, where one of the few rocks available in large quantities can be limestone, which is not always the ideal material. “Septic tanks have the habit of having to be replaced quickly, in years not decades, and the expectation of utilizing scrap tires in septic systems will result in much longer lives for septic system leach fields,” he says.

PAVING THE WAY

The use of recycled tires is also being researched for use in road pavement. And if recycled tires can not be used in road pavement, it has at least become common practice for the road that is being replaced to be recycled, says Byron Lord, deputy director of office pavement technology, Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Washington.

“The FHWA has a strong commitment to the use of recycled materials, where appropriate,” he says. “There are many opportunities to use recyceld materials and the highway agencies have risen to that demand and continue to rise to it.”

Lord says it is standard practice for materials to be recycled in repaving projects, and when engineering demands allow, recycled materials are also used. Currently, using scrap tires in road paving projects is being researched. "A significant volume of material is being turned around and put back into the highway," he says.

THE ROAD TO PROFITABILITY

While applications such as Crown III and Rubberific Mulch are helping find a home and another use for the mass quantities of scrap tires, Serumgard says, “ultimately the marketplace will have to decide whether or not these applications will carry [forward].” He says that while there are some specialty markets for scrap tires, such as using shredded tires in barns and arenas for horses, that these markets can become saturated. “It’s a nice market for the people who are marketing into that niche, but probably is not going to consume all of the scrap tires out there,” he says of ground cover.

Looking for new markets for scrap tires is something that can always invite further research, including civil engineering markets and the crumb rubber area. One example of an application using up large quantities of scrap tires is using scrap tires as a fuel source. Serumgard says that at an Illinois public utility about 2% of the fuel load has been replaced with tires, and that this single application is consuming about 60% of the scrap tires in that area.

While not considered a pure form of recycling by some advocates, such “waste-to-energy” applications for burning tire chips remains the single largest market for scrap tires. RT

The author is the Assistant Editor of Recycling Today.