Crumb Rubber from Scrap Tires

Crumb rubber can be mixed with other materials to make new products, including plastic floor mats and adhesives. It can also be mixed with asphalt as an additive to make cement products. 

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Various rubber products can be manufactured using rubber from scrap tires to replace some or all of the virgin rubber or other material in the product. Tires may be either split, punched, or stamped to yield shapes suitable for fabrication, or the tires may be processed to crumb size to make new products, usually by mixing with other materials. 

When A-R is applied, the applicator usually obtains crumb rubber from the shredder company that is geographically closest to the project site. Since there are a limited number of crumb rubber shredders, scrap tires may not originate from the community buying the A-R application. If, for example, a city or state buying an A-R application is located outside the 200 to 300 mile radius of the crumb producer who is providing the crumb rubber, it is likely that their own scrap tire supply is not being consumed. 

According to Reference [60], a sheet extruder has found a way to lower costs by compounding crumb rubber from recycled scrap tires into PE or PP, using a patented technology. 

These are the main uses for ground and crumb rubber. In addition, another half-million tires or less are used for miscellaneous applications as diverse as can be imagined. The exact numbers of tires used for each application are as up-to-date as possible and as accurate as the data available. Overlaps in category use and some estimates in the number of actual tire units consumed may be slightly different from other published figures. The source of most of the information is the Scrap Tire Management Council that was formed to monitor and promote disposal and reuse of scrap tires. 

Another application of the injection system consists of recycling old and waste rubber. The reactive mixing of crumb rubber with a melted polymer represents an innovative way of recycling these waste rubbers [6]. Some thermoplastic elastomer may contain up to 60% recycled rubber derived from used vehicle tires, and thus through the reactive injection system the rubber scrap is revulcanized [7]. 

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