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Scrap
Tires | Scrap Tire News | Archived Article
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Rubber
Recycling Firms Serves U.K. Industries
"The UK's only cryogenic plant specifically designed and built
to handle rubber material offers manufacturers a cost-saving alternative."
Since its founding in 1997, Swansea, England-based
Rubber Recovery Technologies Ltd. (RRT Ltd) has been developing
a growing business among manufacturers who take recycling seriously
and want to reuse their own scrap material.
"The ideal of recycling general rubber goods
is relatively new in the U.K.," RRT Ltd's John Bryant said.
RRT provides a number of different services and
products that can help manufacturers maximize the use of their
rubber rejects and off cuts and significantly reduce their landfill
costs.
The company uses state of the art equipment to
reduce any waste rubber product into either chip or powder form.
In addition, the size reduction can be tailor-made to suit customer
requirments, Byrant said. Using equipment to ambient grind rubber
crumb, RRT can produce powder down to 400 micron. For ultra fine
powder, the company recommends its cryogenic processing to reduce
the rubber doron to 50 micron or less.
RRT also has the capability to enhance the range
of uses for these powders through its De-Link process. By using
De-Link, the company can rejuvenate all sulphur vulcanized natural
and synthetic rubber scrap. According to Byrant, De-Link will
also rejuvenate sorched material and can be used to surface modify
rubber powders to improve their physical strength when added to
new compounds.
"By using our activated powders new compounds
can be created from scrap rubber," Byrant said. For example,
activated powder can be mixed with thermoplastics to make new
products or with asphalt for road surfaces.
RRT has its own inhouse laboratory and technicians
and as an ISO 9000 certified facility can test and certify any
reground material. "Quality control is extremely important
to our customers," Byrant said. "It is one of the main
reasons we have been able to develop a customer base for use of
our fine powders in tread and sidewall compounds with tire manufacturing
companies," he said.
RRT also offers a complete material collection,
storage and delivery service. Customers can choose special or
customized collection bins and can request on-site training of
personnel to ensure that the rubber is properly separated and
sorted at the source. Collection can be arranged on an on-call
basis, assuring the customer that the scrap materials will be
removed in a timely and safety-approved manner, Byrant said.
Reground product being returned to the manufacturer
can be delivered in bulk, large one ton sacks or smaller 25 kilogram
bags. RRT has its own in-house bagging plant and can customize
most orders to meet customers requirements.
The company's business in the collection side recently
dropped nearly 50 percent after RRT introduced collection charges
for the scrap rubber.
"When we first introduced the recycling service,
our collections were free" Bryant said. "But with using transport
costs and paper audit trails for quality management we were compelled
to introduce collection charges."
Many of RRT's customers chose to revert back to
landfilling their scrap because it is marginally cheaper at present,
Bryant said.
Although it may take some time for landfill charges
to increase, a recent government sponsored study carried out by
Coopers & Lybrand indicated steep rises in landfill charges up
to 135 percent. If the study is correct, Byrant hopes to see many
of his customers return to recycling their scrap.
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