For every challenge raised by shredding used vehicle tires, recyclers keep finding more and more reasons to tackle the problem. They may be heavy, abrasive, threaded with steel alloy wires and ever-tougher fibers, but tires are increasingly regarded as reservoirs of value awaiting only adequate shredding to begin their journey from refuse heaps to valuable materials and products.

At Jordan Reduction Solutions in Birmingham, Alabama, manager of sales and operations Richard Pyle said current applications for tires shredded with the company’s equipment include playground padding, horse tracks, boiler fuels, biofuels and fill materials. “There is also new interest in shredding for the use of chip in the creation of diesel fuel and we have recently installed two shredders here in Alabama for that purpose,” said Pyle.

Jordan’s most popular models for tire recycling are the MS-5028, MS-5040 and MS-6040. “The newest product is the PT-6000 which is a passenger tire only shredder,” said Pyle. “It is capable of processing a minimum of 6,000 lbs. per hour down to a 1” chip and up to 11,000 lbs. per hour in rough shred,” he said. “The 6000-lb. process in a 1” chip is a two-stage process. This makes it a rather economical way to enter tire shredding if the feed stock can be limited to passenger and light pickup tires.”

Because of the increasingly varied uses for shredded tires, and the rapidly changing commodity prices in many markets, Pyle said today’s buyers put a premium on being able to produce a range of shred varieties from their system. “One feature that does seem to be productive is the open-end ability of these units,’ he said. “They can put a shredder in for one product and then add on to take the tires to various stages. So the shredder yields a great deal of flexibility.”

In Grand Prairie, Texas, Granutech-Saturn Systems International vice president Mike Hinsey said the company responds to the reality of shredding tires by focusing on reliability and ease of maintenance. “You can’t take short cuts with tire recycling machinery,” Hinsey said.

Using the company’s Grizzly model as an example, he said, “a customer is inside that machine perhaps a few times a week dong some sort of maintenance task. Knowing that, we’ve designed the machine to open up hydraulically and made the knives very easy to remove and replace. And it’s a low-cost knife design because it’s just a rectangular block of steel.”

Granutech’s Saturn Shredders perform stage one shredding of tires. The Grizzly medium-speed single-rotor machine takes over stage two, where steel is separated from rubber. By adjusting screen size, the Grizzly can produce from approximately .5” to 1” size particles. “That’s the workhorse of tire recycling,” said Hinsey. The most popular Grizzly model for the last decade has been the 300 h.p. Model 80. “We’ve come out in the last few years with the Model 80 200 h.p.,” he added.

Granutech-Saturn also makes machines that produce smaller particles of rubber from recycled tires after the first two stages of processing. “We’ve seen the market want smaller materials,” Hinsey. Recyclers that produce smaller particles reduce the number of competitors they have, he explained.

At the same time, however, his customers are looking at starting with bigger tires. “We’re building a model 7272 HT 800 h.p. shredder that’s going to be for much larger OTR tire shredding applications,” Hinsey said.

At SSI Shredding Systems, Inc., in Wilsonville, Oregon, industrial sales specialist Dave Fleming said diversity and flexibility characterize his company’s products and market. “We make tire shredders for car tires, truck tires, customers who want to shred on a single pass-basis only, customers who want one machine to produce TDF chips, customers who want to process tires to TDF sized chips at capacities in excess of 30 tons per hour – 3,000 tires – and customers who want to process large OTR tires up to 14’ in diameter,” he said. “We also build specially-engineered stationary and mobile machines for customers who have unique applications.”

SSI tire shredder designs focus on durability and ease of maintenance. Features include wear-resistant consumable parts with proprietary hard facing materials, feed hoppers and chutes with access doors, water misting systems to increase consumable parts lifespan and a proprietary bearing protection system. The company’s most popular machines are models M120, M140 and M160 shredders, all capable of processing car and truck tires.

SSI emphasizes catering to customers’ special requirements. “We do not build ‘off the shelf’ shredding machinery that is designed to be used for a wide range of material unless a customer specifically requests a standard machine,” said Fleming.

The company recently redesigned its trommel system. “It is engineered to be a small footprint, easy-to-maintain, high capacity stand alone shredding system for the customer who is looking to make 1.5” to 3” chips from car and truck tires and has an operation that processes somewhere between 750,000 and 2,250,000 tires per year,” Fleming said. They also now have three sizes of OTR shredding machinery. “We call the largest machine ‘The Monster’ and it is able to process the largest OTR tires whole,” Fleming said.

Buyers today want less-expensive solutions that offer lower cost operation. “They are also expanding their end-product markets into smaller and more valuable materials in many cases,” Fleming added. Overall, markets for shredded tires remain strong, with stable pricing and growing demand in fuel, civil engineering and crumb rubber applications. “There is a great deal of interest,” Fleming continued, “in rubber modified asphalt and molded rubber products.”