Using Recycled Tires to Build Quake-Resistant Buildings
Tires are among the shining success stories of the recycling industry. They have been ground up and recycled to produce items such as shoe soles, synthetic turf for sports fields, and even cell phone accessories.
Now a New York-based company has come up with a new use for recycled tires – building material for earthquake resistant structures. Re-Tread Products' Tire Logs made their grand debut last week at the Greener By Design conference in San Francisco.
The logs are arguably the best recycled tire application yet, as they require the least power to create. They are produced by a commercially available sidewall removing machines. Rather than grinding, which is more energetically intensive, the machines slice tires up. An inner core of tire strips is wrapped in helical fashion with other tire strips. The end result is a tire log.
Re-Tread CEO Tom Hanson says the logs have a variety of uses, including retaining walls, highway noise barriers, sandbag replacements for erosion control and security barricades, and as an earthquake-resistant home building material. He states, “It can withstand deformations that would crack or break conventional building materials.”
Re-Tread hopes to turn the 300 million tires discarded every year into a flexible and useful product. It has applied for a federal stimulus grant, which would allow it to open a full manufacturing facility this fall.