Green Impact
Engineered Additives' ERM products help the environment, returning what was once a substantial waste material such as used tires into a resource to solve an emerging supply and quality issue in the roofing and paving industries. Many other products offered by Engineered Additives through its partners are based on renewable resources and do not contribute to depletion of the Earth’s natural energy resources. We are proud to do our part to help our global environment.
Many of our products utilize ground tire rubber (GTR) as the primary platform from which to compatibilize and modify asphalt for paving and roofing uses. Use of our unique GTR based formulations will dramatically expand market demand for finely ground tire rubber, further reducing the use of landfills for disposal of this waste stream. We expect the application of these materials will further enhance pavement characteristics and ignite further growth in the use of GTR, while, at the same time, reducing the amount and cost of polymers conventionally used in modified pavements and roofing products.
Each year in the United States, more than 300 million scrap tires are generated. This amounts to roughly one scrap tire per year for each person in the United States. The majority of those tires, approximately 240 million or 87%, are shredded or chopped and find their way into uses such as fuel substitutes, land stabilization, sports field construction or paving mixes.
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Recycling In the Community |
Driven largely by today’s high cost of energy, the largest use of scrap tires is as tire derived fuel (TDF) into industrial and utility boilers, cement kilns and electric-arc furnaces, where all the components of the tire are fully consumed. The second largest market use for scrap tire material is into land stabilization where the lighter weight shredded tire material promotes drainage, compacts well and does not leach composition contaminants. Further uses exist where the GTR is added as a course aggregate with asphalt or other binder to be laid down on a school or park running track, where the use of tire rubber provides a shock–reducing pavement surface. Finely ground tire rubber mixed with urethane or other polymers may form the base for artificial turf used in a number of playing surfaces and ball fields.
Tire recycling has largely been funded by state and federal initiatives collecting a disposal fee on each discarded tire and by recyclers and collectors charging tipping fees for accepting scrap tires. Anticipating a huge market opportunity funded by these collected fees, a large number of tire processors entered the market, only to fail and close when the end market opportunities did not materialize. The finished GTR did not yield enough added-value to justify the processing costs, grow the market use and support the investments without the state fees.
Many end market uses have been limited by the high costs involved in generating the type and quality of ground rubber required for that market segment. Concerns were raised about heat build-up in use of tire components for land stabilization. As market demand for running track pavements declined, uses of ground tire rubber for this segment have declined. The dry process for using GTR as a fine aggregate in a paving formulation has shown mixed results and many states have termed it uneconomical at best.
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Materials Used in our Products |
The wet process uses finely ground crumb rubber blended and reacted with asphalt as the modified pavement binder. Results are mixed but largely suggest this application improves pavement quality over typical asphalt hot mix and several states are closely evaluating this type of construction, albeit at a higher cost of application.
Despite diligent efforts by every state to regulate and encourage the re-use of scrap tires, nearly 40 million tires still end up in landfills each year. In addition to the newly discarded tires, there are estimated to be approximately 200 million tires in stockpiles in various locations around the United States. Engineered Additives is pleased that it can contribute to using recycled tires as a key raw material. | 
