Here are several things you might want to consider when you’re looking at getting into the scrap tire recycling business. First of all you need to make sure that you have the population base in your area to sustain a tire recycling facility. Also you want to make sure that you don’t have existing competition that will cause you to discount the price that you should be paid to dispose of the tires. These are two of the things we are constantly telling our potential customers to take into consideration before jumping in.

Next you must locate a property that will work well for this type of operation. You must make sure that the property can be easily bermed up to control water run off as well as make sure that it is large enough for the storage of tires and any type of end products that you might be producing in the future. If the property has an existing building on it you need to make sure that it will work for this type of endeavor. Or if you’re going to have to build a building that you have adequate room on the property for the size building you want to build. Make sure that you have access to a very large supply of 460 volt electricity (if you’re in the USA) because all the equipment used in this type of industry requires large amperage electricity. Also when selecting this property you need to make sure that you have good access to getting semi-trucks with trailers in and out of the property. Finally you must check with the state and make sure that they will be able to issue you a permit for this location. Don’t spend money before you have your permit in place because some times this procedure can take over a year.

Then you need to decide which method or type of tire recycling that you’re going to use. Are you going to sort and cull your tires and sell off the good ones? Are you going to just cut your tires in half or quarters and landfill the material. Or are you going to primary shred your tires and landfill this material. Or are you going to take the primary shred down to 2″ chips (TDF) by using a secondary shredder or chipper. Or maybe you’re going to take the 2″ chips down to ¾”- ½” size so you can sell them as mulch. Or maybe you’re going to take this ½” material all the way down to ¼” and sell it as playground material. And of course maybe you would want to take this ¼” material all the way down to 10-40 mesh crumb rubber. Each one of these steps or stages is very costly so we truly believe that it is beneficial to make sure that you’ve got each step or stage paying for itself before you move on to the next step or stage.

Of course all this depends completely on what you’re able to develop in the way of markets for any of these end products. So many times we will try to talk a potential customer into trying to research what their end markets might be upfront before they do anything else. Many times this will point you in the correct direction that you need to develop your business around. We always try and encourage our customers to do their homework up front because we don’t want to see you fail. We’d much rather have happy customers that will come back and purchase more equipment from us as their business continues to grow instead of ones that are destined to fail because they didn’t do the proper homework up front.

Our main focus over the 14 years that we’ve been in business is to always tell everyone that they must walk before they run. This means they should start out small and gradually work their way up through all the different phases of the business before they go out and spend millions of dollars to find out that this business isn’t for them. Shredding tires isn’t an easy business and with this endeavor comes many challenges as it does with most any other business venture. And we’re always here to talk to should you need any advice or have any questions about the industry as a whole. We want you to succeed and we’re here to hopefully point you in the right direction. Not that we know everything about the industry but if we don’t have the answer we will more than likely know someone to send you to for the answer. This is a very small industry and many of the people involved have worked together over the years to get much accomplished with not only governmental regulations but with end product acceptance as well. Again we encourage you to contact the “can do crew” at Unlimited Resources Corporation for any questions you might have regarding this industry.