Do you ever wonder what happens to your old tires after they’re replaced on your car? Do you ever wonder if there was a better way to prolong tire wear? Do you ever wonder what kind of recycled uses there are for old rubber like worn out tires?
In today’s world, whenever you get a new set of tires, there’s an “environmental” fee for the service station to take them. Apparently, that helps offset the cost of getting them recycled into something useful.
If you have larger tires, they can be retreaded and there are companies in North Dakota that carry out that service. This is mostly done with large truck tires and some farm implement tires.
But generally speaking, if you travel around the state of North Dakota, especially on back roads like gravel and/or minimum maintenance roads, you’ll find tires everywhere. Sometimes there are multitudes of them just sitting around on the prairie. And in most cases, those tires have been there for decades, much like some of the old machinery.
According to several tire companies, worn-out car tires are collected and taken to a recycler that turns them into playground surfaces, asphalt material, rubberized mats or even fuel in certain cases.
If you’re a football fan, many of the professional, college and even some high schools are going to artificial turf. The material for this is crumb rubber, which is made from recycled tires.
So tires can and do get recycled, and there are places in North Dakota that do this, but there is a price for doing so. And in the grand scheme of things, how many retired or soon-to-be retired farmers are going to ante up to have the tires taken off their property and recycled?
Old farm machinery gets recycled, but in that case, the property owner is usually paid for the metal. In other cases, people make it their business to go out to farmsteads and clean up old machinery.
They take it for free and clean up your property. In return, they keep the nominal recycling earnings. It’s a win win.
Tires aren’t like that. Because they are a petroleum based, the method isn’t as easy and takes more specialized equipment. One obvious example is in order to recycle tires into a playground surface, the wires embedded in the tires needs to be removed before the rubber can be chopped up.
Unfortunately, you can’t recycle tires like you can metal, cardboard or lumber. There are ways to do it though, most notably using old tires for gardening beds. Sometimes they’re used for dog beds or cut in half and used as tree swings.
Those noble ideas are all good and well, but they don’t solve the problem of piles of old tires on the prairie landscape.
In the 1980s, less than 20 percent of tires were kept out of landfills. Today, that number is somewhere between 80 and 90 percent, but less than half of those are recycled, at least locally.
Getting into the tire shredding business can be highly profitable, but understand there are some high upfront costs. A commercial tire shredder can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000.
There are lower-end tire recycling machines that are generally designed for municipal recycling operations. They can cost between $15,000 and $20,000, but apparently will shred rubber or plastic.
In today’s world, $20,000 isn’t a lot of money, especially for a city like Fargo that has had a robust recycling program for more than 30 years. Some service stations have enough business to justify such an expense and others may want to avoid finding markets and just break down the rubber themselves and re-purpose it.
Whatever the reason, As recycling becomes more important to save landfills from filling too quickly, this is an opportunity that could benefit any established recycling program, especially in government subdivisions and be a big step in protecting the environment.
