Eli5 why can’t tires be melted down and reused?
In: 808
I just want to mention that plastics and rubbers and stuff are not simply stuff melted together. Melting and burning changes the stuff chemically. There are some plastics that can be molded and reset with heat, but only so many times and they take damage every time. Like stress fatigue, the way water carves rock (that’s an analogy, water doesn’t carve rock but rather erosion).
Vulcanized rubber tires are formed out of several materials, structured composites really, and then cooked with other chemicals and such, like a recipe, and the order they were made mattered greatly. So you can’t really melt it all down and reform it and expect it to be the same. I can’t think of anything cooked that adding more heat makes it go fresher again.
If you remember basic chemistry, there are physical changes (reversible) and chemical changes (generally not reversible). Making tires is a chemical change, and so is melting them.
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