Recycled Rubber Flooring - Why and How

Recycled Rubber Flooring

Recycled Rubber: What are the benefits and how does it work?

Many Greatmats rubber flooring products are made with rubber that has been reclaimed from automobile tires. Rubber recovery can be a difficult process but there are many reasons that we feel rubber should be reclaimed or recovered for use in rubber floors as well as a number of other products. Since the vast majority of rubber exists in the form of tires for vehicles, the recycling process tends to focus on those. As most rubber exists in the form of tires for vehicles, the rubber recycling process is typically focused on reusing tire rubber. Here are several reasons why recycled rubber is a popular flooring option. One that can help cut down on costs, as well as help the environment.

Recycled Tire Flooring

- It is far less expensive than natural or synthetic rubber. Recycled rubber is much less expensive than natural or synthetic rubber. It often costs less than half to recycle rubber than to product virgin rubber.

- Some properties of recovered rubber are actually better for some applications than virgin rubber. This is one reason you will often find rubber rolls and rubber floor tiles made of reclaimed rubber.

- Making recycled or reclaimed rubber uses less energy than making virgin rubber.

- Rubber can be difficult to dispose of, and recycling it is an excellent way to get rid of used rubber. The new rubber products that are made from recycled rubber can be used in a wide variety of different applications,

- Many useful products, including rubber rolls and rubber tiles are manufactured by using materials from used rubber tires and other rubber products.

- Tires provide substantial amounts of power in incineration. Some cement factories in Australia, for example, use used tires as a fuel source.

Rubber Recycled Mats

While there are many benefits to recycling rubber, around the world, many used tires are still thrown away. In some countries, an enormous amount of used rubber is buried in landfills when it could easily be reclaimed for use in products such as rubber rolls or rubber floor tiles. In some nations a large amount of rubber is buried deep in landfills when it could have easily been recycled to be used in products such as rubber flooring. Many developing nations are leading the effort to recycle rubber. In Pakistan, for example, tires are collected and cut into pieces. The beads are removed and the rubber is burned to expose the steel. The treads and sidewall are pulled apart with the treads then cut into strips. These strips are used to cover the wheels of donkey carts and the sidewalls are used for items such as shoe soles and slippers.

Oftentimes damaged tires are repaired instead of being blindly replaced. Tubes can be patched and tires can be given new life. One process that is common in developing nations is what is known as regrooving or retreading. This process is used more frequently in places where regulations are less stringent and the standards are not as high. (Speed limits are also set lower so the dangers of using re-grooved tires is decreased.) The use of retread tires saves energy. Where a new tire needs 23L of crude oil for raw materials and 9L for process energy, re-grooving tires only requires 7L and 2L respectively. Passenger vehicle tires can typically only be retreaded once, but industrial vehicles such as trucks and buses can have their tires be retreaded up to six times in some cases.

The process is fairly simple. The remaining tread of a tire is removed and turned into tire crumb. A new tread is then vulcanized (see our content page on Vulcanization) onto the remaining shell of the tire.

Recycled Rubber Mats

In addition to the smaller recycled that is involved with retreading, recycling entire old tires is also a cost effective and environmentally friendly option for tires at the end of their lives.  Tires can be used as tree guards, for erosion control, used in artificial reefs, fences, or as garden decorations. In some countries, wells are lined with old tires. Docks in lakes, rivers, and oceans are lined with tires to guard against boats damaging the dock.

Rubber tires can also also be recycled by reducing the used tires into their granular form and then reprocessing the granular rubber. This is a costly process and requires a manufacturer willing to purchase the granules. The crumb rubber that is an afterproduct of the retreading process can be used in this manner as crumb rubber is a high quality rubber. Rubber manufactured by this process is often used in lower grade products like floor mats for cars, shoe soles, or as asphalt in road construction.

Another distinct way to recycled rubber is done by a chemical and thermal process. This type of recycling requires higher tech, more sophisticated equipment. In this process, the used rubber is chemically treated, and then processed mechanically. This can be done in a number of different ways:

-Acid reclamation used hot sulfuric acid to break down the fabric of the tire.

It also uses a heat treatment to make the scrap rubber more ''plastic''. This allows its use as a filler with batches of crude rubber. This process results in the strong rubber smell that some product have. When choosing the a rubber flooring product, it’s important that odor is considered. The room the rubber is going to be used in should be part of that consideration.

- Alkali recovery - Used rubber is treated by heating with alkali for 12 to 30 hours. This can be used as a mix with crude rubber as a method to lower the price of the finished rubber product.  The amounts of reclaimed rubber that are used depend on the quality of the article to be manufactured.

- Pyrolysis - This process involves heating the used tires in a vacuum with no oxygen present, which in turn causes the rubber to recompose into gases and constituent parts. This technology is still fairly new in as an approach to tire-reprocessing.

The least desirable destination for tires is landfill. The landfill disposal of tires, if properly managed, is not necessarily an environmental problem. Not reusing tires is a missed opportunity to conserve resources and energy, a further reason for opposition to landfilling used tires. Also, public sanitation and municipal waste management is often ineffective in developing countries and scrap tires are often found littering the streets which can have negative consequences for the environment

Recycled Rubber Rolls

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