Tread cutter attachment expands tire processing options

For tire recyclers, truck service centers, tire stores, and other operations that regularly accumulate waste tires, there are essentially two conventional options: pay someone to haul the tires away and recycle them or invest in the equipment required to fully process the tires themselves. However, there is quite a bit of territory between those two options. A large tire recycler may have sufficient volume to justify investing in a large, high-torque shredder. A truck repair facility or tire store paying a few thousand dollars each month to dispose of tires probably does not. Even recyclers that already own smaller or midsize shredders can run into problems when processing larger truck and OTR tires.

Saw-Type Cutting System
© BCA Industries

OTR, or off-the-road, tires are the larger, heavier tires used on construction, mining, earthmoving, and agricultural equipment. The sizes vary tremendously, but the recycling problem becomes fairly obvious once one is sitting in front of a shredder. There is considerably more tire to deal with, and some of the internal reinforcing components are extremely substantial.

One of those components is the bead wire. The bead is the reinforced ring around the inside diameter of the tire that locks it against the wheel rim. Embedded in the rubber are bundles of high-strength steel wire. During normal service, that steel is essential because it keeps the tire seated securely on the rim. At the end of the tire’s useful life, however, that same extremely strong steel becomes something a recycler has to cut through. And cutting through bead wire repeatedly with a shredder is not necessarily desirable.

Tread Cutter Hydraulics and Controls
© BCA Industries

Keeping the bead out of the shredder

A common assumption with larger tires is that the answer is simply more shredder: a larger cutting chamber, more horsepower, more torque. Although that can work, putting an entire tire through a shredder means it must deal with everything in that tire, including the bead. In larger truck and OTR tires, the bead can contain an extremely heavy concentration of high-tensile steel approximately 5/8 to 3/4-inch thick.

“The issue is not whether a sufficiently large shredder can cut it – it can. The question is whether it makes economic sense to repeatedly force shredder knives through that material when the bead can be removed first,” says John Neuens of BCA Industries, a Wisconsin-based manufacturer of industrial shredding and recycling equipment.

That is the basic idea behind BCA Industries’ SWC100 Sidewall Remover. The machine cuts both sidewalls, including the bead area, from the tire before the remaining tread reaches the shredder. A newly introduced tread cutter attachment then allows operators to take what is left and cut the remaining tread into smaller sections for shredding, transportation, or disposal.

Tread Cutter with Sidewall Remover
© BCA Industries

How the SWC100 works

The SWC100 is an all-hydraulic machine with an automatic tire lift. Instead of manually wrestling a large tire into position, the lift raises it into the machine, where both sidewalls are cut during the same loading cycle. This eliminates the need to cut one sidewall, flip the tire, and then cut the other.

BCA offers the SWC100 in both a portable gas-powered model and a stationary electric model. The tread cutter bolts directly onto either version and ties into the machine’s existing hydraulic and control system. It can be ordered with the machine or added later by an existing customer.

BCA estimates the SWC100 can process approximately one tire every 35 seconds, with an operating range from passenger tires as small as 17 inches to semi-truck tires up to 44 inches.

After removing the sidewalls, the operator moves the remaining tread to the cutter. The tread cutter bolts onto the existing SWC100 frame and utilizes the machine’s existing hydraulic and control system. The cutter utilizes a specialized saw-type cutting system, and both sets of cutting components can be sharpened while still installed on the machine. Safety is addressed through a two-hand operating requirement, so the tread cutter only operates when both of the operator’s hands are in the required push position.

If the tread is being transported elsewhere for final processing, a single cut opens the donut so it can lie flatter and stack more efficiently. Or it can be cut multiple times to the desired final size.

The sidewall is not necessarily waste

There is another benefit to removing the sidewalls first. They do not necessarily have to be treated as waste. Intact tire sidewalls already have established reuse markets because they are heavy, durable, and useful in applications where something simply needs to be weighted down.

One common example is the base of traffic barrels. Another is agriculture, where sidewalls are placed over plastic covering outdoor silage piles to hold the material in place. “It’s not really tire recycling, it’s tire reuse, but it’s pretty universal,” says Neuens. According to Neuens, sidewalls can bring approximately $ 2 each. At 100 tires per hour, with two saleable sidewalls recovered from each tire, that represents approximately $ 400 per hour in gross potential material value.

“At that rate, the economics start to become fairly straightforward when compared to the approximate cost of the equipment,” says Neuens. “It’s a pretty quick payback.”

Another option for tire recyclers

For tire recyclers, the real value of the sidewall cutter and tread cutter is in changing what goes into the shredder. Instead of feeding an entire truck or OTR tire into the shredder, the sidewalls and heavily reinforced bead can be removed first. The remaining tread can then be cut into smaller sections before it reaches the shredder.

For recyclers already operating smaller or midsize shredders, that can be significant. The shredder is still doing the shredding, but it is receiving material that has already had one of the more difficult components removed and has been reduced to a size it can more readily process.

For recyclers, the sidewall remover and tread cutter can simply serve as the first processing steps, with shredding and downstream material handling to follow as needed.

BCA’s PD1000 and PD1000 IO provide options after that pre-processing. The PD1000 is a portable, dual-shaft, low-speed, high-torque shredder that can process semi-truck tread after the sidewalls are removed, while the PD1000 IO adds material handling to the process.

For operations processing passenger, semi, and super single tires, the PD2000 provides another solution, taking the material through whole-tire-to-TDF processing.

For tire stores and truck service centers

There is also an opportunity for truck service centers and tire stores that generate a lot of scrap tires, but not enough to justify buying a shredder.

According to Neuens, some truck repair facilities pay an average of $ 15 to $ 20 to have each truck tire removed. By using the sidewall remover and tread cutter together, the operator can remove the two sidewalls, potentially sell them, cut the remaining tread into manageable sections, and consolidate the material for transportation or disposal.

There is another practical issue as well. Tire stores and truck service centers continually generate scrap tires, and those tires do not stop accumulating simply because the recycler has not arrived yet. If the tires remain intact until pickup, they also take up considerably more space.

Removing the sidewalls and cutting the remaining tread as the tires accumulate changes that. The material is easier to store, handle, and transport, while giving the operation another option besides simply waiting for the next pickup.

Not every operation needs the same level of tire processing. For some, the goal may be to prepare the tire for an existing shredder. For others, it simply may be to reduce the size of the material enough to make storage, handling, and transportation more manageable.

That is really where the tread cutter fits. It provides operators with a practical alternative to deal with scrap tires based on what they need to do with them next.

www.bca-industries.com