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Scrap
Tires | Scrap Tire News | Archived Article
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Stockpiles:
The Other Side of Tire Recycling
There's no glamour in cleaning up stockpiled tires. This is not
the stuff that sets a technology developer's heart racing or sends
the designer of a slick new rubber product into creative overdrive.
James Waldron
knows this. "We're on the other end of the spectrum," he
said. In 1993, his company Tri-Rinse™ Inc., an environmental
services company based in St. Louis, Missouri, started a tire
shredding division with one mobile shredder and focused its efforts
on state programs for cleaning up scrap tire stockpiles. "We
saw it as a niche - but an important one," Waldron said.
Now six years
later the tire stockpile abatement division accounts for 60 percent
of the company's business and has helped states like Missouri,
Virginia, Illinois, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania
and Kentucky cleanup some of their largest stockpiles.
To date, Tri-Rinse
has cleaned up approximately 11,000,000 passenger tire equivalents
(PTE's). The majority of the shredded material went to secondary
processors who prepare the shreds for tire derived fuel (tdf)
markets, or for beneficial use applications in landfill construction
or other civil engineering projects. The scrap tire stockpiles
are processed in onsite factories, Waldron said. "We bring
shredding equipment, heavy equipment to stage the tires, and office/workshop
on wheels," he said. "When a scrap tire leaves one of our
sites it has already been cut to an appropriate size for beneficial
end use or for use as a feedstock for downstream processing,"
Waldron said.
Tri-Rinse has
four mobile shredding systems which include one large Williams
Pulverizer rotary shear shredder, two conveyors, one to three
power plants and one or two pieces of heavy equipment to stage
and load tires. Tri-Rinse also has a fifth shredder - which is
stationary and operates at the company's home base in St. Louis.
On average,
Tri-Rinse's cleanup operations handle a daily volume of about
9,000 PTE's with one shredder. On large sites, the company will
often use two full shredding teams and process and ship an average
16,500 PTE's.
"With our
capacities, we can handle the abatement of the larger sites in
far less time than many contractors," Waldron said. "It's
helped us keep our prices very competitive." Most of the cleanup
jobs are awarded through an open bid process, Waldron said.
Over the years,
Waldron and the sales team at Tri-Rinse have learned how to prepare
a quality bid - the hard way, by losing a bid. One of the things
Waldron learned from the state bidding process was that under
the Freedom of Information Act, unsuccessful bidders had access
to the successful bid specs once it was awarded. "This has
been a real learning process for me," he said.
To remain competitive,
the company continually monitors and refines its operations. "We're
constantly improving our site set up," Waldron said. "We
know how to handle a site cost effectively - but each site is
different. You've got to know how to maintain those efficiencies
for each situation."
One way is
throughput, Waldron said. "We only shred tires once and we
shred all sizes of tires so we have to be fast but we also have
to produce a good quality primary shred...we've learned to be
fast and efficient." The company's largest pile cleanup to
date was the King George pile in Virginia which contained 4,500,000
PTE's. Tri-Rinse completed the job in 432 days processing at a
rate of 104 tons per day. All of the shredded material was used
for alternate daily cover at Virginia landfills.
Recently, Tri-Rinse
set up operations at the Fairfax County, VA Solid Waste Transfer
Center. Under terms of a one year contract with the county, Tri-Rinse
will process "daily flow" tires at the site. According to
Waldron, daily flow has been averaging about 200,000 tires per
month which are shredded for use as fuel at a county resource
recovery facility. The remainder are being used for a drainage
layer in landfill cell construction and for daily cover.
The company
is bidding on large pile cleanups in Missouri, Indiana and Iowa
this summer. For the future Tri-Rinse is looking at the potential
for secondary processing.
Project
History Tri-Rinse Inc.
Approximately
11 million PTE's cleaned up to date
1995 Tire Processing Statistics
€ 18,229 tons shred (1,822,900 PTE's)
€ 88.22 tons was the daily average
€ 100% benefically reused
1996 Tire
Processing Statistices
€ 19,980 tons shred (1,998,000 PTE's)
€ 104.06 tons was the daily average
€ 99.996% beneficially reused and .004% unkown
1997 Tire
Processing Statistics
€ 38,500 tons shred (3,850,000 PTE's)
€ 102.4 tons daily average
€ 95.1% benefically reused and 4.9% too contaminated to
recycle
1998 Tire
Processing Statistics
€ 31,910 tons shred (3,191,000 PTE's)
€ 91.1 tons daily average
€ 98% beneficially reused and 2% too contaminated to recycle
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