Eco Green Equipment says its ECO Shear has now processed more than 100,000 mining tyres, a figure that says a lot about the scale of the problem it was built to tackle
A single tyre off a haul truck can stand 156 inches (almost 4 metres) tall, weigh several tonnes and contain enough steel to destroy equipment built for passenger and truck tyres. For years, most of these tyres were stacked at the mine site or buried, simply because machinery that could process them economically did not exist.
The ECO Shear was built to target the first stage of that problem. A single operator can cut a whole off-the-road (OTR) tyre, up to 63-inch rim, into uniform 28-by-28-inch pieces that the rest of the line can handle without shock loads or excessive wear.
Eco Green Equipment’s OTR equipment is now running in recycling plants in Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Canada and the United States, with Latin America leading the way, unsurprising given how much of the world’s copper, coal and gold comes from Andean and Colombian mines and how many haul trucks are needed to move it.
Eco Green’s equipment was designed around mining tyres from the outset rather than adapted from passenger tyre lines, which, according to Eco Green, is why its equipment keeps running when the feedstock is a multi-tonne tyre full of steel.
The plants themselves vary considerably. The simplest ones turn whole mining tyres into tyre-derived fuel (TDF) for cement kilns and other industrial users. At the other end of the scale are full lines that reduce a mining tyre all the way to powder. The ECO Giant handles primary shredding and releases the steel, the ECO Grater turns that shred into wire-free chips, ECO Granulators reduce the chips to 12mm and below and ECO Krumbuster cracker mills finish the job, producing fine crumb and rubber powder.
Output from these complete plants is aimed at every market a mining tyre can reach: premium buffings, TDF, clean steel, crumb rubber and rubber powder for rubberised asphalt, new tyre compounds and athletic surfaces. A tyre that used to be a liability at the mine becomes several product lines, each with its own buyer.
The plants have been going in over the past five years, with more on the way. Each one closes a loop that previously ended at a stockpile: a tyre comes off a haul truck and, rather than sitting at the mine for decades, goes back out as fuel for a cement plant, steel for a mill and rubber for roads, playgrounds and new tyres.
