What to Consider Before Purchasing Used Tire Recycling Equipment
If you are just about to launch your first tire recycling business or upgrade an existing plant, you must be looking for reliable machinery with high performance. To help you make the right choice, we describe below important equipment parameters you would need to consider before launching your new plant.
Are you interested in learning more about used tire recycling equipment for sale? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!
Input and Output Capacities
Your choice of equipment must match your business needs by comparing its capacities with your estimated supply and processing time. Slower equipment can increase operational costs, reducing profits. While slower production may sometimes yield better quality and safety, your tire recycling line should operate at high capacities to ensure there is enough spare time for unexpected maintenance.
Byproduct Separation
Effective tire recycling involves separating by-products such as steel wire and textiles from rubber. While these by-products can be valuable, their presence in rubber granulate or powder can reduce material quality and value. Choose equipment that optimizes earnings by providing a superior final product.
Power Requirements
Energy efficiency is crucial in the tire recycling business. Inefficient equipment can significantly drive up costs, affecting your bottom line through higher electricity bills. The impact of this factor depends on your country’s electricity prices.
Operating Staff
The required staff for operating the equipment is another essential factor. In nations with low labor costs, labor-intensive models may work. For instance, some recycling balers require manual labor for tying bales, while others have automated systems. If labor expenses are high, consider automating your plant.
Time of Operation
Inquire about the equipment's recommended operating time to ensure longevity. Calculating expenses in advance helps in financial planning for timely equipment replacement. Verify the manufacturer’s claims by consulting companies already using the same equipment to compare theoretical data with actual performance.
Replacement Parts and Maintenance Kits
Understand when major maintenance or replacement will be required to plan for production downtime and financial expenses. Compare maintenance costs across different manufacturers and consult with current users to ensure the manufacturer's claims are accurate. Ensure spare parts can be delivered swiftly to avoid prolonged downtime during emergencies.
Safety Parameters
Safety is paramount when dealing with heavy machinery and potentially hazardous materials. Know the safety features included in your equipment to compare different models and manufacturers. Consider risks such as rubber powder ignition and employee safety around shredders. Equipment manufacturers can help you mitigate these risks.
Customer Support by Manufacturer
Buying equipment is an investment in a long-term relationship with the manufacturer. Prioritize companies that offer excellent customer service. Look for reviews and testimonials to understand others' experiences and seek awards or ratings from marketing research and customer service agencies for added assurance.
Warranty
Typically, tire recycling equipment comes with a one-year warranty, as their longevity significantly depends on how they are used. Ensure that you will receive appropriate reimbursement and technical support if issues arise. Precaution is essential in this capital-intensive business.
Opinion of Experts
Choosing tire recycling equipment requires comparing the manufacturer's claims with real-world data, which can be time-consuming and challenging, especially for newcomers. Consulting experts can save you time and money by providing informed recommendations.
Weibold helps both new and well-established tire recycling companies clearly define all pros and cons of equipment. Our technical comparison studies have already supported a number of companies worldwide, saving tens of thousands of dollars in lower expenditures and higher performance.
To order a technical comparison study, send us an inquiry to robert@weibold.com, and we will help you build a successful tire recycling business.
Recycled Used Tires - Tire Reviews, Buying Guide & ...
Introduction
"Creating things takes a lot of hard work and genius, no doubt. But it takes even more ingenuity and hard work to use the creations wisely, to not let them turn into waste once used, to make sure that the very mother earth we took so much from is not left for the worse because of her own generosity and kindness. It takes a sensitive mind to be aware of one’s ways."
- D. Thoreau (Walden, 1854)
This quote from a man who has had immense influence on generations of thinkers, philosophers, educators, scientists, politicians, businessmen, and common people sums up the majority of problems that mankind faces today. The evolution of technology has indeed made our lives simpler, easier, and more convenient. But in the process, we have invariably impacted nature – our only source of useful things – in many negative ways.
Talking about technology, a mention of vehicles just cannot be avoided. Fuel-powered engines were the first exponents of the industrial revolution, and the very first thing they were put to use in were vehicles. Today, the number of vehicles all over the world is rapidly increasing. The growth is so steep that nothing but the word ‘exponential’ can even begin to describe it. A statistical insight into the number of vehicles that ‘hit the road’ each year in the United States can be very revealing in this regard.
Referring to numbers published by the Department of Transportation, Federal Government of the United States (collated by Statista), the number of civilian and business vehicles (this excludes armed forces, law and order, and other vehicles as government properties) has increased from nearly 180 million in 1990 to over 250 million in 2013, a growth of nearly 40%.
The trend isn’t much different in any other part of the world, either. The very purpose of furnishing these statistics is to show that with the increasing number of vehicles, there is an inevitable rise in the quantity of materials discarded upon scrapping of vehicles. Among these discarded materials, tires pose the toughest challenges. A good quality top-brand car tire can provide up to 20,000 miles of road service. Once that limit is reached, most experts call for a change of tires.
So, what happens to old, used tires?
They are invariably gotten rid of via easy but dangerous methods like burning and dumping. However, tire recycling has evolved to a very sophisticated level. There are many alternatives to these dangerous practices, and some of them will be discussed in detail in this text.
Applications and Technology Derived from Recycled Used Tires
There are a number of applications of recycled used tires. Some of them can be very straight-forward and don’t need any technical processing, while others require some level of processing to elicit utility value, either in the form of direct use or in the form of indirect secondary applications, from them.
The hierarchy that the Environmental Protection Agency’s waste recycle norms dictate is as follows.
Artificial Reefs
Tales from the Bottom – Controversies and Success Stories
Marine reefs are some of the most breath-taking natural habitats. Formed over thousands of years, reefs can host millions of marine species in an environment that’s not only unique but also self-sustainable. Remarkably enough, the most impressive use of recycled used tires that has ever been thought up was to create artificial reefs.
The idea was hailed as revolutionary in the 70s and 80s. Many countries around the world, including Canada, the United States, and France, decided to dump used car tires into moderately shallow ocean waters to help marine animals and species find a comfortable residence. The idea was to promote tourism and fishing while getting rid of obnoxious rubber waste.
Even though there were mild success stories of these ‘artificial reefs’, the idea itself seems to have backfired as many natural conservationists have called for the retrieval of millions of used car tires from the ocean waters to prevent their long-term toxic effects.
The most ambitious of these projects was the Osborne Reef Project in Florida where a huge undertaking by the United States Navy in collaboration with Goodyear (a major tire manufacturer) saw nearly 2 million used car tires being dumped in the Atlantic Ocean.
It was later found out that the slow release of heavy hydrocarbon molecules from the tires prevents marine species from making these tires their habitat. About three decades later, even bigger projects were undertaken to retrieve these tires from the waters.
Environmental Impact Assessment
Many scientific studies have divulged that, in the long run, rubber tires are not viable options for creating artificial reefs. As a part of a study carried out by a team of marine biologists from the University of Southampton, systemic concentrations of various metals and other materials in species living near or in such artificial reefs were measured. It was found that these species carried unusually high concentrations of mean metals – zinc, lead, copper, and cadmium. At many points, these concentrations were thought to be higher than the fatality level for marine species.
Other studies, such as the one endorsed by the Russian Journal of Marine Biology in 2002, back these views, claiming that used tires can only speed up the secondary contamination of sea waters.
Related Studies
As the novelty of the concept of using discarded tires for artificial reefs wore off, more and more studies emerged questioning their usefulness in the long run. A private study commissioned and funded by Nova Southeastern University observed that when tires are used for the creation of artificial reefs, the very motive is to create artificial fish aggregation colonies. As tires lose their relative density underwater, they can be easily moved by strong underwater sea currents. As they keep constantly moving (in stark contrast to the steady bases of natural reefs), the stability of the whole ecosystem is compromised. Furthermore, the continual emission of metals and hydrocarbons (foreign to marine life) poses biological threats to the species in the long run.
On the other hand, there were some studies, particularly commissioned by the State of Florida and conducted in the first half of the 1990s that concluded that using scrap tires for the purpose of artificial reefs and fish aggregation was not only economically attractive for the state, but also environmentally useful for the marine species. Such studies, however, were few and far between. Majority of the research available today is in favor of using natural materials or innocuous materials (like discarded steel frames or specially designed concrete blocks) for artificial reefs.
Construction Materials and Civil Engineering
One of the more feasible and economic uses that recycled used tires find is in construction materials and civil engineering. Most of the tires manufactured today are made of high-quality mixes of natural and synthetic rubber that is specially designed to withstand high pressure. This particular property comes in handy in their uses in the aforementioned areas of application. Such uses are outlined below.
- Rammed Earth Construction Materials
Rammed earth techniques of durable construction have been around for decades. In these techniques, highly compressed ‘earth’ (sand/soil/clay) is used as the basic building block of a project.
Recycled used tires can be employed to contain this compressed mass of earth in a solid framework, imparting more stability to the structure. Since tire material is relatively less dense, it reduces the further normal load on the base of the building. Simple and cheap materials like cardboard sheets can be used to pack the assembly in what civil engineers call ‘tire bricks’.
Tire bales can be described as superior versions of rammed earth tire bricks. They weigh a lot more than a regular tire brick assembly (up to 2,000 to 2,200 pounds in some cases) and hence, are only useful in large projects.
A single building using tire bales for outer walls can consume thousands of used tires of regular size.
In earthquake-prone zones, especially far eastern countries like Japan, recycled used tires are regularly used in the construction materials of houses and other buildings. Tires provide lower overall density to the building, without trading off the stability. Furthermore, as tires are made from rubber – a highly flexible and pliable material – construction bases made using recycled tires have better flexibility and lesser rigidity. This allows the buildings that use such materials for their bases to stay quake-proof to a certain degree.
Other applications of recycled used tires in construction and civil engineering include:
- River embankments
- Bridge abuts
- Wall fillings
- In asphalt mixes for road construction
- Landfills
- In artificial turf and synthetic surfaces for sports (gymnastics, basketball, etc.)
Fuel
Even though they take a long time to get ignited, tires are easily flammable once there. They have a high intrinsic calorific value. That’s precisely why many argue that using tires in construction or landfill purposes is akin to wasting this calorific value. Of course, there are inherent emission issues associated with their direct incineration. Hence, other approaches to harnessing this calorific value and using tires to generate usable fuel have been researched and employed. Today, up to 50% of all recycled mass of tires in the United States is used for the production of tire-derived fuel.
This is the most common form of using tires as fuel. In this, tire remnants are shredded and mixed together to create a solid fuel stock that can be incinerated in a specially designed furnace to generate energy.
Shredded tire parts are devoid of any metal wires or casings. They have a very high calorific value – up to 15,000 to 16,000 BTUs per pound, which is higher than anthracite (12,000 BTU/lb) and bituminous (13,000 BTU/lb).
Tires can be used in supplementary capacities to aid primary fuels like wood or coal. Tires are often used in what is called a ‘priming’ process – a process that gets the furnace heated, creating enough carbon dioxide to increase the residence temperature so that further combustion of fuel can be facilitated.
- Tires are Used as Fuel In:
- Paper Industry
- Cement Industry
- Mining Industry
- Industrial Boilers
- Thermal Power Plants
- Advantages and Disadvantages of Tires as Fuel
Table 1: Advantages and Disadvantages of Tires as Fuel
Advantages
Disadvantages
Low cost
High zinc residue
Better utility
High dioxin and furan emissions
Reduces fossil fuel consumption
High percentage of overall carcinogenic emissions
Reduces sulfur emissions (SOx)
Reduces nitrogen emissions (NOx)
Recycled Tire Products
Besides the ones listed above, there are many other uses of recycled tires. These are more of the ‘creative’ kind and don’t generally require heavy-duty processing before recycled tires can be put to use.
One of the biggest problems that most ranchers and farmers across the world face is keeping their livestock free of diseases. Most of these diseases originate from the lack of hygiene. Cattle accessories like livestock padding, poultry mattresses, and equine mattresses that are made out of recycled tires help prevent the infestation of various bacteria and insects around the livestock.
Such cattle accessories are cheaper than grass or cotton accessories and are much easier to clean. They are also indefinitely durable.
A variety of molded objects can be made from recycled used tires. These range from heavy ship shock absorbers to tiny rubber casings for electronics and other gadgets.
Another prominent use of recycled tires is in the footwear industry. Many tire companies, designers, and high-end boutiques already sell footwear made wholly out of recycled used tires. They have extensive applications themselves – from safety shoes at industrial plants to chic slippers for evening strolls.
There are several other miscellaneous uses for used tires. Some involve the use of tires in ‘as they are’ condition (innovative furniture, utility objects, household planters, etc.) while others may warrant some processing before usage (backyard kids’ pool, trampoline base, treehouse stairwells, etc.).
Tire-Derived Aggregates
In construction, an ‘aggregate’ is a general term used to describe a custom concrete mixture. The composition of an aggregate is dictated largely by the application it’s supposed to offer. Tire-derived aggregates (TDA) have been used in construction, especially where a large quantity of ‘buffer’ material is required (e.g. roadways).
Tire-derived aggregates are prepared by mixing a certain ratio of shredded used tires with a ready-mix concrete mixture. The size of the shreds depends upon the application. It typically ranges from 2 inches to 12 inches. Geometrical shapes (regular shapes) of shreds are preferred over irregular shapes.
There are two major types of tire-derived aggregates.
In type A TDA, the shreds used are on average, not wider than 3 inches. They are preferred to be superficially rectangular or circular. Type A TDA is used in residential and commercial building constructions.
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In type B TDA, the shreds are wider than 3 inches. Type B TDA is often used in large and crude construction projects where fine finish isn’t necessary.
The advantages of using tire-derived aggregates over traditional gravel/soil/sand/clay derived aggregates are:
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