Reclaim Rubber

It is not clear what you want to know - Where , Why , When or How?

I have a where for you! (the environment is the why)

Some time ago there was a drowning (or murder) in a feature dam in a natural water course at a shopping and office complex. The lungs were found to contain really dirty water. It was then realized that there was a thick layer of suspended goo.

The catchment of this dam consist of.

1) A highly populated area with flats or apartments (partly degraded) - a lot of pollution including "rubber" from wheels and powder from brake pads.

2) light to heavy industries.

3) old mine dumps.

4) free ways and roads.

5) and whatever bad thing humanity can offer.

The first step would be to pump the dirty water and filter out the bulk of ther goo.

The 'clean" water should also be treated fuhrer.

The challenge would further be to reclaim anything from the goo.

The problem is that reclaiming may not be viable and therefore the dam is left in a dead state.

Rubber is an unstable product which will leech its binders and solvents over time. Depending on what it is used for it may also build up calcifications within the rubber structure and be contaminated with whatever it is in contact with.

Rubber will weather which causes it to harden, this is due to the solvents leeching.

Often not viable to reclaim but very nessecary to clean up before dumping.

What types of rubber were you thinking of, what was it used for and why do you need to know how to reclaim?

I'm not sure why you feel "rubber" is unstable, or what solvents you believe are found in rubber. Automotive tires, early tank treads, Catepillar treads, as well as undersea cables for telephone etc lines, hoses, cables, etc were encased in rubber before better synthetic plastics became available. Bellows, tubing, conveyor belts, etc were all made from rubber, including for food contact, with no noticeable short-term (in decades of years) degredation or solvent release. Natural rubber has to be formulated properly, whether compounded on a mill or whereever. Synthetic rubbers are used in an extremely wide range of products with exceptional lifetimes.

Also rubber can be recycled into many different products (uses). Such as shown here.

Also consider "[I]n developing countries this hand reprocessing of rubber products to produce consumer goods is well established and the variety of products being made from reclaimed tyres and tubes is astonishing. The rubber used in tyres is a relatively easy material to reform by hand. It behaves in a similar manner to leather and has in fact replaced leather for a number of applications. The tools required for making products directly from tyre rubber are not expensive and are few in number. Shears, knives, tongs, hammers, etc., all common tools found in the recyclers' workshop, along with a wide range of improvised tools for specialised applications. Shoes, sandals, buckets, motor vehicle parts, doormats, water containers, pots, plant pots dustbins and bicycles pedals are among the products manufactured." The foregoing excerpt is from this site.

I, personally, like the recycled ground rubber athletic tracks found at many colleges and universities. These tracks are great for running because of the cushioning they provide (ankles and knees, etc.).

-John

I am sorry and appologise, for some reason I thought it meant reclaim and use for its original purpose AGAIN! This is not possible as the rubber does degrade over time.

The rubbers I was talking about are the printing rollers as used in lithography. These rollers run at different "milling" speeds to eachother and have a hard life with all the chemicals they are being bombarded with. These rubbers degrade significantly over time and may sometimes be renedered useless after 1.5 to 2 year periods. You could never reclaim and make them into printing rollers again.

I agree you can reclaim and recycle such as playground floors and gym room fllors. Also lacally to me you have a lot of horse studs and they chop old tyres up foor the excercise grounds for the horses. When people fall it does not hurt as much.

Sorry for an incomplete answer

Thats interesting! I just finished making a handbag for my wife out of a tractor tire. If one justs closes there eyes for a moment and visualise actually the amount of tires in our mitts, one then would come to the conclusion that consumer goods manufactured from old tires is unrealistic. Burn them baby. A used tire is a great source of heat. The reason this isn't more prevalent is do to the transportation cost moving the tires to locations in-order to burn them. Have you ever noticed the "FEE" you pay to get rid of old tires. Thats used to offset the cost of shipping to a facility that burns them. There are a few WTE (waste to energy) facility's that almost exclusively operate on tires for fuel.

They are a bit hard reading but do explain the principle by which rubbers in general degrade. During this degradation some contents or compounds are changed and this cannot be reversed.

We all know rubbers degrade as the rubber seals on car doors and windscreens discolour and go hard. This ultimately causes failure. After this weathering of the rubber, you could not reclaim it and make the same item out of it again, see my reply below. I agree that I did not take into consideration the reclamation into other purposes, which is possible and done in many places now.

https://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/full/71/6/2803

copy of other article:

"Blends of PVC with purified commercial chlorinated rubber are substantially less stable than would be predicted from a comparison of the degradations of the constituent polymers. Hydrogen chloride is the sole volatile product in the temperature range of the main degradation reaction. By the use of PVC labeled with ³⁶Cl together with inactive chlorinated rubber, it has proved possible to distinguish the production of hydrogen chloride from the PVC from that from the other polymer. In this way it has been established that it is the PVC component which is responsible for the greatly increased production of hydrogen chloride. Explanations are advanced for the effect of chlorinated rubber in destabilizing the PVC."

As you can see rubbers are considered unstable because they change their state over time under influence from outside sources. Unless you can isolate it from those sources, i.e. under water!!!, you will always have to deal with this fact.

you probably know about the playground surfacing made from it, but there are more tyres than playgrounds to surface them with.

I believe in Holland they use old tires to create roads. That is they grind it and combine it with asfalt and concrete to form something they call ZOAB (Zeer Open Asfalt Beton) it has many advantages like significantly less noise, and no mist formed by droplets when rain water stays on the surface and cars splash into it. The water is drained off much faster and does not remain on the surface. Disadvantages are problems when freezing due to thew fact that the road drains the water faster deicing chemicals drain away too fast.And what I heard is that heavy equipment causes damage to the road when trying to stop suddenly in hot weather. http://www.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=af30f8d6-3d75-400f-aab4-4de1a520e73d&lang=en

Hi mightymike,

From your link: "ZOAB has to be repaired once every six to nine years".

Around here, Atlanta, freeways, and especially city and county roads need repair much more often than that! Thing about potholes is that they proliferate like rabbits. They worsen much faster than the city or county is willing, or able, to repair.

Sounds like Niki Kringos program is looking at asphalt deterioration in general as opposed to ZOAB in particular.

Seems to me like heavy equipment stopping fast in hot weather would cause damage to most all kinds of asphalt. However, overall it looks like a good use for recycled rubber. Looks like if water drains off faster, deicing chemicals would be less important anyway. I do see your point though.

-John