Making of Rubber Mulch from Scrap Tires!

Our company Unlimited Resources Corporation (URC) has been involved in the building of several secondary grinding systems where the product produced was mainly used for the rubber mulch industry. Some of these systems were set up to make just plain black rubber mulch and others were set up to paint the mulch many different colors. The mulch produced from these systems is used in many applications and much of it is used for decorative mulch in all types of commercial landscaping venues. URC can Custom Build whatever your needs are for any type or color of rubber mulch you need to produce.

When you are making this mulch you have to start with a scrap tire that has already been primary shred down to 2”-3” in size. Machines that we would use to do the secondary grinding would be the Granutech/Saturn Grizzly®, Eldan Rasper®, Columbus McKinnon Liberator® or the Raptor TG Secondary Tire Grinder®. Each of these machines would perform the same task. They take the “feed stock” (2”-3” sized tire chips” for secondary grinding down to ¾” minus sized rubber mulch. In the process they also extract much of the wire from the rubber. Then we would send this material over a vibrating conveyor with a cross-belt magnet over it and re-move as much of the steel as possible at this point.

We generally take this ¾” minus material and put it into a screw auger conveyor and take it up to a two deck Rotex® screener. We generally put ½”opening screens on the top deck of the Rotex® screen and a ¼” opening screens on the bottom deck of the Rotex® screener. This will allow you to make three different size materials from the ¾” minus sized material you produced from your secondary grinding of the 2” -3” tire chips. We would then take each sized material being produced out from under the screener with three separate screw augers and take it up to a very strong drum magnet where we would remove even more steel from the product. At this point we generally have removed materially all the lose wire from the product as well as any steel that is protruding from a piece of rubber and are able to safely sell it for a rubber mulch product. We would then take the material to a bagging station to be bagged or on to a paint line where it would be carefully painted and then dried and bagged at that point.

The primary product we generally will be producing for a marketable rubber mulch product is ½”x ¼” in size. This size product seems to work well for most landscaping projects and also seems to be the most popular with commercial users. We also generally give our customer the option to be able to produce a ¾”x ½” size material which we generally call our nugget mulch and this can also be custom painted and used in the landscaping business. Of course we can custom build a plant to produce whatever size mulch you might have the need for.

The final product that you would be producing would be a ¼” minus sized product which would contain a considerable amount of 10 mesh minus sized product. Generally you would need to install another granulator or crackermill to reduce all this material down to less than 10 mesh to make it marketable. Or you may just elect to find a customer who needs this size “feed stock” for their production of a specific sized crumb rubber they produce in their plant. Generally the ¼” minus sized product is not used for any type of rubber mulch. Rather it is farther processed down to be used in the creation of crumb rubber.

So if you’re thinking about getting into the rubber mulch business please give Elaine or Richard a call at 660-295-4204. Also if you have the need for any type of tire recycling equipment or complete whole plants give the “can do crew” at URC a call. Our goal now and always has been to treat all our customers the way we would want to be treated if we were the ones doing the buying. We always maintain a very large inventory of all types and brands of tire recycling equipment. So if and when you have the need for any kind of recycling equipment make your first call to Unlimited Resources Corporation, the guys who have been serving the industry for over twenty years.