Shred of the Month - August 2005: Tires

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August 2005 - Tires

The Challenges

Tires.... they're made to be as indestructible as possible, so they can last a long time on your car. Once they've reached the end of their useful life, what happens to them? The answer for many of our customers is to use them for alternative fuel applications, for civil engineering applications or recycle them into new products. In order for this to occur, the tires first need to be reduced in size. Tires have high carbon steel in them (bead wire and radial side walls), which is very abrasive and hard to cut up. The nylon cord is also abrasive. The rubber is compressible and it "absorbs" energy from whatever it comes in contact with - whether it's a roadway or the cutters in a shredder that are trying to cut it up. It takes a strong machine with a lot of "shear force" to successfully process tires over extended periods of time.

The Solution

SSI offers a variety of tire shredding solutions. Our shredders are a result of 25+ years of continual design improvement facilitated through our own R&D as well as our customer's feedback. SSI tire shredding machines are extremely versatile, robust and easy to maintain. We have installations processing everything from car tires only up to 14' tall mining equipment tires (OTR tires). Tire shredding machines typically range from 100HP to 500HP and they are sometimes arranged in a system that consists of multiple shredders and screens set up in series to produce small chips at throughput rates from 2 to 30tons/hr. This video sequence depicts a mobile tire shredding machine that can process car and truck tires to 2" nominal chips.