Perfect partners in reinventing the wheel

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This article was published 19/08/2017 (3005 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For more than a decade, two local companies have enjoyed what, in many ways, is the perfect partnership.

Selkirk-based Gerdau Recycling Manitoba collects wheels of all sizes, shreds the steel rims, then melts down the steel and uses it to make a variety of new products, including grader blades and elevator guide rails. But it has no use for the rubber tires frequently attached to the wheels.

Winnipeg’s Reliable Tire Recycling collects tires, and the tires are often still attached to a rim. It recycles the rubber tires to produce a variety of other goods, including gym mats and landscaping mulch. But it has no use for the rims or the steel wire it removes from steel-belted tires.

So through their joint involvement in Tire Stewardship Manitoba, the two companies formed a working partnership through which Reliable sells its unwanted rims and steel wire to Gerdau, and Gerdau hands over its unwanted rubber tires to Reliable.

It’s an arrangement that has produced big dividends for both companies. In the past two years alone, Gerdau has shipped more than one million pounds of tires to Reliable for recycling. And in the past year, Reliable has shipped 173 tons of steel rims to Gerdau.

Spokesmen for the two companies maintain the biggest winner in this long-standing partnership is the local environment.

Jarrett Wiebe, sales manager at Reliable Tire, said before Manitoba began recycling unwanted tires, they often would pile up in yards and landfill sites around the province.

“There had been such a problem with this in years past. There were thousands and hundreds of thousands of them in landfills,” he said.

Chad Webster, division manager for Gerdau Recycling Manitoba, said it takes anywhere from 50 to 80 years for a single tire to decompose.

Wiebe said that before his time, some people would burn their unwanted tires just to get rid of them.

“Do you know how bad that is for the environment?” he asked.

“So it’s imporant to recycle tires,” Webster said, adding he gets personal satisfaction from knowing Gerdau’s unwanted tires don’t end up in a landfill.

“I have four young boys at home, and what kind of world am I leaving them? I’m happy to say I’m leaving the world in better shape, hopefully, than I found it in.”

Webster said Gerdau recycles steel rims from many types of vehicles, including agriculture and construction equipment, tractor-trailers, cars, trucks and motor homes. In addition to grader blades and elevator guide rails, other products it makes include forklift tines and super-light beams used in the production of flatbed trailers.

Reliable Tire’s chief financial officer, Brandi Wermie, said some of the other rubber products Reliable makes include sidewalk blocks, parking curbs, rain splash pads, lawn-and-garden edging, mats for hockey rinks and horse stalls, and blast mats for the construction industry.

Reliable’s other company, Prairie Rubber Paving, operates in Winnipeg, Regina and Saskatoon.

It uses recycled rubber to resurface cracked concrete surfaces such as driveways, pool decks, walkways, stairs and playgrounds. Wiebe said its rubber parking curbs are among the company’s most popular products.

“But we also sell a lot of (rubber) matting, and all of our mulches are quite popular, as well.”

Webster said Gerdau’s partnership with Reliable came in extra-handy a couple of years ago when Gerdau, which gets wheels from a variety of sources, found that despite Reliable’s weekly pickups, it still had too many tires piling up in its yard.

“We had been building and building and building our inventory of rubber tires over the years, and it just got to become an eyesore and an environmental issue,” he explained. “So I contacted Reliable Tire and asked if there was interest in taking more tires. It turns out they had a need for more tires, and we certainly had a need to get rid of the tires we had on-site.”

So Reliable Tire started picking up tires two or three times per week, instead of once. It took almost a year, but eventually this arrangement eliminated Gerdau’s surplus-tire problem. Now weekly pickups are sufficient, Webster added.

Reliable Tire has a staff of 50 full-time workers and is Manitoba’s largest tire collector and processor. Since its inception in 1992, it has collected and processed more than 25 million tires.

Gerdau Recycling Manitoba is a division of Gerdau North America, which is one of the largest steel recyclers on the continent. The company manufactures steel products for the construction, automotive, agricultural and energy markets.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca