Despite being a form of plastic many rubber products including bike tires and inner tubes cannot be recycled by your local curbside recycling program.
What can rubber be recycled into.
The environmental protection agency estimates that of the 290 million scrap tires generated every year 12 million are recycled and used in asphalt with arizona utilizing the most rubberized asphalt of any state in the nation.
Recycled rubber can also be transformed into floor products.
First a rubber product can be refurbished.
Used rubber tires can be recycled by grinding them into crumb rubber and mixing the recycled matter with asphalt for use on state highways.
Some old tires are used as fuel in the cement industry or ground into rubber crumb and used as a reinforcing agent parents will be familiar with the rubber mats used in children s playgrounds.
Prior to recycling they need to be cleaned and cut down to a uniform size.
However they can often be reused upcycled into cool gifts or recycled by specialty recyclers.
Unprocessed elts are large unwieldy and typically covered in dirt.
Alternatively contact a business that produces rubber mulch like the kind used in children s playgrounds.
Silicone rubber also possesses non stick qualities so it can be formed into flexible cookware such as muffin and cake pans.
See the list of ideas below.
If not look online for a rubber recycling program in your area.
Elts are fed into a granulator where they are fragmented into smaller pieces collectively known as crumb rubber.
This flooring can be used both indoors and as an outdoor paving option.
Tires can be reclaimed into among other things the hot melt asphalt typically as crumb rubber modifier recycled asphalt pavement crm rap and as an aggregate in portland cement concrete efforts have been made to use recycled tires as raw material for new tires but such tires may integrate recycled materials no more than 5 by weight.
Silicone rubber is heat resistant so can be used to make cookware including oven mitts tongs pot holders and pan handles.
A single passenger tire can generate 10 12 pounds of crumb.
The short answer is that unquestionably rubber can be recycled to create a large amount of recycled rubber products that are utilized in some very common and some very interesting ways.
To recycle rubber start by contacting your local recycling facility to see if they can recycle rubber products.
For example retreading old tires produces functional refurbished tires.