Tires are polluting the planet at an alarming rate. In addition to the environmental damage, discarded tires are a public health concern because they are a breeding ground for disease-carrying insects. Liberty Tire Recycling wants to reduce these negative impacts—and it is succeeding. The company collects and processes over 217 million tires annually, preventing over 4.3 billion pounds of rubber from going to landfill last year alone. It has also successfully remediated 150 dump sites since 2011. No wonder this company claims the title of market leader in tire recycling management.

Innovation and vision are at the heart of the business. The team is encouraged to see beyond the ordinary, envisioning potential instead of pollution. This creative, can-do mindset is key to the company’s success and has led to many innovative products.

Take yoga mats as just one example of practical, impactful repurposing. The team creates tire crumb that is ideal for manufacturing sustainable mats. With an estimated 40 million-plus people in the United States practicing yoga, there is a huge market for the product. In 2021 alone, Liberty Tire Recycling displaced an estimated 190,000 metric tons of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) through the use of tire crumb for rubber mats.

Using North America’s biggest network of tire recycling facilities, the company collects scrap tires and provides remediation services for abandoned tire piles. After the team collects the tires, they process them, resell any tires that can still be used safely, and break down the remaining tires into raw materials. Manufacturers then use this recycled rubber to create safe and innovative products.

These products include everything from rubber mulch, rubberized asphalt, and artificial turf to shock-absorbing athletic surfaces, rubberized flooring, and landscaping products. In gardens, athletic fields, playgrounds, and more, this recycled rubber is finding new life in a wide variety of places. The company is behind a number of well-known brands commonly stocked in home improvement stores, including Rubberific®, GroundSmart®, and NuScape.

Liberty Tire Recycling relies on “four pillars of sustainably” for guidance. The first pillar is the advancement of sustainable products. Ultimately, the goal is to minimize waste by finding a beneficial reuse for every part of a discarded tire. This means always being open to new ideas for safe, sustainable applications.

Safety is always at the forefront, so every Liberty Tire Recycling product is safe and environmentally friendly. The company’s organic products are OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute) certified, and the team continues to move forward toward compliance with ASTM testing standards and IPEMA testing for applicable rubber products.

The acceleration of environmental stewardship is the second pillar, and recycling old tires is just a part of the team’s commitment to sustainability. The company has identified areas where it can slash consumption of greenhouse gases and has rolled out software that optimizes collection routes and makes sure that each truck is loaded to capacity by the end of the route, reducing the carbon impact of collection itself. In addition, the company complies with all regulatory requirements and follows best practices when it comes to emissions, water and waste management, and energy efficiency.

The team measured the company’s carbon footprint and handprint in 2020 and 2021 to better grasp its total impact on the environment. By measuring its handprint, the company can determine how helpful it is to use recycled products versus virgin alternatives, and how much that use could reduce global greenhouse emissions.

The third pillar is to engage people and communities. This begins with a workplace culture that prioritizes health and safety. The goal is zero workplace injuries, fires, or accidents. The company’s safety program relies on proactive measures that are backed by research, and the positive impact of this approach is evident; Liberty Tire Recycling has seen an 82 percentg decrease in lost time injuries and a 67 percent decrease in annual OSHA recordables since 2010.

Liberty Tire Recycling invests in its people, emphasizing growth and development and promoting from within the company. Promoting diversity and inclusion is an ongoing effort. The company partners with veteran recruiting agencies throughout the United States and participates in an immigrant hiring program, employing over 100 Venezuelan immigrants in the past year. The team has also hired more than 200 workers through its second-chance program, which offers employment to people who have recently been released from prison.

When it comes to the community, the team believes in leading by example and strives to be good corporate citizens. Liberty Tire Recycling supports its local community in a variety of ways, including helping families in need during the holidays, participating in the CT Clean River Project, and sponsoring a youth sports team.

The company’s fourth pillar is to operate responsibly, believing in maintaining a strong moral compass while doing business. The company utilizes a Code of Conduct in order to promote honest, ethical behavior; accurate, fair, and timely disclosure practices; full compliance with applicable rules, regulations, and laws; immediate reporting of violations; and overall accountability. Cyber security is also an important component of responsible operations, so the company has a robust program in place to mitigate threats.

The team reports that reclaiming, recycling, reusing, and repurposing is only the beginning of its commitment to good environmental stewardship. In order to help build a better future for the planet, Liberty Tire Recycling has set specific targets for the future, as outlined in its 2022 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) report.

The company has a goal of zero waste by 2030, with every tire it collects entering an end-use market. The team also plans to lower energy intensity by 25 percent by 2032, achieving this by identifying opportunities in a number of areas including compressed air management, LED lighting upgrades, peak demand, power factor, and production efficiencies.

By 2032, the company also plans to improve fleet efficiency by 30 percent. The team will carry this out in a number of ways, including the use of alternative fuels, route optimization, DOT compliance, idle time reductions, driver training, and increased fuel efficiency.

The team is committed to forging ahead, stating that, “We won’t stop looking for product opportunities in the market. We constantly ask ourselves if recycled rubber is the perfect answer to an unsolved problem or if it can be a better solution than products that currently exist.” Liberty Tire Recycling is a company to watch as the team seeks to uncover those better solutions—and deliver them.

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“At the end of the day, we make feedstock. Customers call us up and say, ‘I need x million pounds of material, at this hardness, this tensile, this amount of flexibility and elongation,’” explains Director of Business Development, Tribu Persaud.

In addition to the Cambridge head office, the company has a facility in Woodstock, Ontario, and facilities in Orlinda, Cumberland City, and Erin, Tennessee. It has a North America-wide market reach and a very specialized focus. “We’ve been recycling vinyl almost exclusively since the early 1990s,” says Persaud, who notes that vinyl is simply the ‘street term’ for what is technically called polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

Norwich Plastics offers closed-loop recycling solutions, also called circular recycling. In closed-loop recycling, products are used, recycled, and then transformed into repro to be used again by the brand owner/OEM or go into new products, thus keeping them out of landfills indefinitely. The closed-loop recycling process can be used for both post-industrial and post-consumer waste.

The company also facilitates toll processing. This is the term used when a producer recovers and recycles plastic scrap generated through its production process so that it can be reused. In such cases, Norwich Plastics consults with the producer and examines their scrap. The company “figures out what processing methods are relevant, then runs a trial for [the client]. We’ll determine their needs: do they need a powder, a pellet? What are the specifications they need the product to perform at? What properties do they need?”

The company also accepts scrap that is not designated for toll processing, careful in such cases to transform the scrap into something that will not compete with wares made by the material supplier.

Reprocessing scrap can involve multiple steps, including reducing scrap to as little as 400 microns; compounding, in which reclaimed materials are custom-compounded into powders and pellets, according to client specifications; and contaminant removal/reduction, in which contaminants in reclaimable vinyl material are removed, reduced, or transformed into a vinyl composite, again depending on customer requirements.

Specific procedures include shredding, granulation, blending, air separation, and heating. The quantity of scrap, powder, pellets, and other finished goods handled by Norwich Plastics is staggering. “It’s a volume game. You have to do good volume to make money in this business,” notes Persaud.

Norwich Plastics has ISO 9001 certification and a very strict quality assurance regimen. “Everything has to be documented. You have to have written work instructions, written job descriptions. You have to have clear standards,” he says. “You have a third party come and audit your quality system.” He is strongly supportive of the ISO system, as “it makes the process accountable.” This makes particular sense as all the company’s work is self-performed. “We grind and process everything we sell. We don’t really use other people to do the work.”

Manufacturers use the reprocessed vinyl to make garden hoses, building products such as roofing membranes, and flooring and swimming pool components. Norwich Plastics also does “a small amount of injection moulded product applications,” says Persaud.

While the company has worked with hospitals for years, it wants to expand its reach in the medical market. In 2020, for example, it partnered with the Vinyl Institute of Canada—an industry trade group based in Niagara Falls, Ontario—and Environment and Climate Change Canada, a branch of the Canadian government, for a pilot program called PVC 123.

As the first program of its kind in Canada, PVC 123 aimed “to divert products from landfill and encourage the recycling of PVC medical devices in hospitals. Hospital operating rooms which produce the highest volume of intravenous bags, oxygen masks, and oxygen tubing waste, will be the first point of collection, after which, collected material will be manufactured into new products,” stated a Vinyl Institute press release.

Even after the official pilot ended, Norwich Plastics continued to work on this medical recycling initiative. “As of this year, we’ve converted it to a program where we’re charging the hospitals for the pickups. We basically funded that process for the last couple of years,” Persaud explains. Norwich Plastics currently has “about 20 facilities in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), from Woodstock, Ontario to Toronto, Ontario, participating in the program,” he says.

The company has big ambitions for this endeavour and is preparing to “take the program across the province. We’re speaking to facilities and looking to sign up facilities all the way from Windsor to Ottawa, and as far north as Barrie or Sault Ste. Marie,” he continues.

Norwich is also building its reputation within the U.S. medical recycling sector. The firm received a grant from the Vinyl Institute in Washington, D.C. to assist with a vinyl recycling project at in the Rochester Regional Health System in Rochester, New York.

This intense focus on vinyl recycling is a far cry from the early days of the company. Established in 1987 by Tribu’s father Paul Persaud and his business partners, Norwich Plastics initially handled “almost every polymer that was available to us that we could recycle and sell. We were seeing if we could make a go of the recycling business,” Persaud recalls.

In 1989, the company began to concentrate on PVC material, and by the early 1990s, Norwich Plastics was primarily a PVC recycler. Over the decades, branches were established in Woodstock and Tennessee. Persaud describes Tennessee as “a great state in terms of geographic location. You basically hit everything south of Ohio.”

His father remains involved in the business, while Tribu runs day-to-day operations. The firm is currently led by the family and business partner Glenn Longey, who looks after the Tennessee operations.

With a continent-wide reach, the company’s growth strategy is based on simple economics: “Does it make sense to pay the shipping [to a new region]? At the end of the day, we will go where it makes sense in terms of the business,” explains Persaud.

This system is highly dependent on the actions of the workforce and as such, he likes to hire “go-getters” and “self-doers,” who are loyal to the company and committed to its mission. “We’re looking for people that want to grow with the business. Most of the people [in] management started at entry-level jobs,” he adds. At present, Norwich Plastics has just under 50 employees in Canada and around half that in the United States.

While Norwich still relies on a paper-based production system, it is also forward-thinking and innovative. The company is “always looking at new methodologies” and new processes. For example, the company is heavily invested in developing composites made from two materials. “When we say composite, we’re taking PVC material and we’re mixing it with other materials,” says Persaud. “Other polymers are incorporated in there. You’re basically making a composite of PVC and whatever the other material is.”

Composite production “is something we’ve kind of been doing for a very long time, but now it’s really coming into play because of landfill diversion requirements and EPR legislation,” he points out.

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a strategy designed to make producers—rather than communities—more responsible for collecting and recycling. EPR and landfill diversion are two priorities for eco-friendly politicians seeking to encourage sustainability.

While a huge advocate for sustainable practices and recycling, Persaud finds the mounting regulatory requirements somewhat wearisome. The growing skilled labour shortage—as existing workers retire and not enough young people fill their positions—is another challenge. “Everyone is retiring. There was a time I could call 14 to 15 welders, and now there are three or four,” he states.

For all that, he is proud of Norwich Plastics’ impressive longevity and achievements. As for the future, Persaud is keeping a close eye on developments in the American market and elsewhere. “I think there’s a lot of toll manufacturing and toll recycling getting done up here in our Canadian operations but, in Tennessee, I think there’s going to be tremendous growth, especially as companies re-shore to the U.S.,” he states. “The other thing I would like to see moving forward is growth in the post-consumer side. To me, that’s where the market is going to go.”

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