Scrap Tire Recycling

Due in large part to a ban on tires in Ohio's landfills and the lack of in-state users of tire-derived fuel chips, Ohio is well ahead of the national average in tire recycling. According to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, about 70 percent of Ohio's scrap tires are being recycled. These tires are retreaded; made into new products; or used or mixed with other solid fuels to produce electricity in industrial boilers and cement kilns. Another 38 percent are shredded for use as a substitute for gravel in landfill drainage systems. Nationally, only 26 percent of scrap tires are recycled to make new products.

Despite that relative success, Ohio still ends up with over three million unused scrap tires in tire-only landfills or illegally dumped around the state. With tire recycling markets developed, ODNR is working through its Scrap Tire Market Development Grant Program to develop markets among Ohio industry and utilities for tire-derived fuel chips.

Scrap tire recycling in Ohio

$1 million of that money is set aside annually for the state's scrap tire market development program. The program is designed to develop markets for scrap tires by helping manufacturers and utility companies cover the start-up of costs of incorporating scrap tires as manufacturing feedstock or as tire-derived fuel in industrial boilers and furnaces.

In the meantime, a handful of tire recyclers and distributors of recycled-content rubber products in Ohio offer tire chips for playground and garden mulch, pour-in-place rubber surfacing for walkways and running tracks, paver tiles, doormats and other secondary products. Many tire shops also sell used and retread tires.

Conservation benefits of tire recycling

• Recycling tires reduces pollution and energy consumption. Finding new uses for used tires is the most beneficial use of scrap tires, followed by retreading old tires. Grinding tires down to crumb rubber to be used to make new products is the next best option because it keeps the material around to be recycled yet again. Greater one-time energy savings can be realized by burning tire chips for fuel, but that obviously forecloses further recycling opportunities.

• The full benefits of using rubber as playground mulch, in roadbeds, running tracks and walkways are not well documented, but reduced injuries, reduced vehicle and roadway maintenance and reduced mining for traditional paving materials like sand and gravel may make such engineering applications of scrap tires the best bargain of them all.