Last year, 102 tons of discarded tires were taken to a local tire processor to be chopped into bits and recycled into other products.?”Everything in the tire is sellable, so we have zero waste,” said Kim Heiderscheit, operations manager of Liberty Tire Recycling, 1914 E. Euclid Ave. “Everything has a use.”
Liberty Tire accepts car, farm and truck tires and grinds them into bits to sell to manufacturers and construction companies. Fiber and dust produced in the grinding process are sold as fuel to Alliant Energy, which burns it with coal to produce electricity, Heiderscheit said.
Anyone can dispose of their tires at Liberty Tire, for a fee of $2 each, or $1 each for quantities of 50 or more. “John Q can bring tires in here and get rid of them in a responsible manner and for a reasonable fee,” Heiderscheit said. “Everything is converted to a valuable commodity.”
Or they can deposit them at Des Moines SCRUB events at no cost, and the city will take them to Liberty Tire. “This is a convenient way for people to dispose of them at no cost,” said Greg Chloe of Des Moines Public Works. “We’re happy to provide them that opportunity, rather than see them illegally dumped or going to the landfill.”
Liberty Tire ships about 32 million pounds of black rubber every year. The recycled rubber is used to line landfills, make rubber mats and bumpers, and cushion playgrounds, football fields and horse arenas. It’s mixed with other products to pave sports tracks and highways, used as mulch, made into backstops on shooting ranges, used in septic tank drain fields and, in some cases, sent back to the tire manufacturers to be reused.?Some of those products are easily seen around Des Moines.
“Any school here that has an artificial field or running track, chances are, they use our product,” Heiderscheit said. About 400 to 500 tons of metal also are extracted from the tires each month and sent to steel mills. At today’s prices for metal, the steel extraction process is breaking even, Heiderscheit said.??About 25% of a truck tire’s weight is from the steel, a cluster of a fine filaments that are flexible but difficult to break. The steel is chopped up with the rubber and separated from it by a magnet that is so strong it will erase cell phone memories and affect pacemakers within a few feet, Heiderscheit said. The rubber runs through the magnetic extraction process three times and the resulting metal goes into a pile that resembles a giant stack of steel wool before it’s trucked away.
Metal tire rims also are recycled. Tires still on rims are run through a machine that compresses the tires to pop out the rims. The recycling plant sees about 12 to 14 tire-filled trailers each weekday, each holding nine to 15 tons, Heiderscheit said.??In Iowa alone, more than 3 million waste tires are generated each year, according to the Department of Natural Resources. (Tire Review/Akron)
