why ‘tire graveyards’ are a thing and not just recycled or broke down and reused?
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Tire distributor here in Canada
So there are many ways to reuse a tire especially big commercial tires. Typically people will retread a good casing and reuse it. If properly taken care of you can technically retread is a few times each time getting less and less kmz but still it’s easily possible to reach a few hundred thousand kmz on a first time retread.
If a tire is doomed to the graveyard (in Canada atleast) importers such as myself pay a tariff based on the size of the tire upon import. There are government sanctioned recycling facilities that pick up for free and will take the tire to a recycling facility which pulverizes the tire into a carbon powder and strips the steel bands away. They melt the steel obviously and the little black bits are made into everything from playground matting to astroturf to hockey pucks (Canadians duh).
However there are technologies based out of Europe that are making there way into North America (slowly) that convert any carbon based material into water, electricity and a desired fuel, these facilities cost hundreds of millions but truly remarkable what they can do with a 0 carbon footprint.
Sorry I didn’t explain like ur five.
What about shredding them down & mixing with asphalt to make tougher roads?
Saw a YouTube video where the machine pulled out the steel bead and the rest was chopped up.
Another YouTube video showed tires being inserted into other tires to save space for shipping. Maybe 4 tires in the space of 1.
Actually hippies use them to build houses call “earthships” and recently it was found that tires are a greener replacement for coking coal in making steel
They’re often used as blast mats when blasting rock in an area where you can’t have rocks flying way up into the air and coming down all over the place. They’re partially cut up and all tied together and laid on top of the rock being blasted.
Tires are cheap to use and expensive to reuse. Our economy doesn’t take reuse into account so it’s technically cheaper to burn them at the expense of our environment than it is to responsibly reuse the product.
Materials cannot be recycled as others explained, but whole tires can be repurposed for their structural qualities, for example to reinforce shorelines or hill sides.
No discussion is complete without mentioning [crumb rubber.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumb_rubber) This is bought and sold as a commodity, and market prices will often dictate how quickly tires get recycled.
The best they can do is stack ’em better and protect them from arsons/natural disaster. We’ll get better at tearing them apart in the future.
Toward the end of manufacturing, the rubber goes through a process called “vulcanization”.
This basically fuses the rubber molecules into one giant tire-shaped molecule. After vulcanization, it’s not as simple as melting the rubber back down, since the rubber no longer melts, which makes it basically impossible to recover the rubber in a usable form.
(Some tires do get ground up and used for track surfaces or playgrounds, but that rubber couldn’t be used in tires again)
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