Rubber mats produced from recycled tires provide a softer surface for sensitive cows' hooves.
Landfill waste and old tires get put to good use in an Eastern Ontario facility
André Laflèche could recycle old tires until the cows come home. In fact, he does.
His company in Eastern Ontario, Moose Creek Tire Recycling, uses advanced technology to take things that nobody ever loved − landfill waste and used, toxic tires − and turn them into rubber mats that protect the sensitive feet of cattle.
"Sometimes I stand at the corner and look at what we've got, and I pinch myself. I think I'm just dreaming," he says.
His barn mats are manufactured by a Sherbrooke, Que., company called Animat, using Moose Creek's recycled material. Some 300,000 mats are produced annually and exported to 39 countries.
Laflèche's dream was that there had to be something better to do with old tires than simply dumping them. It's possible, thanks to a system that uses the landfill waste in sophisticated gas turbines to produce the energy needed for the recycling process. It's a triple bottom-line solution: the generators create energy from waste, the tires get recycled into new products, and Laflèche and Animat have an international business that provides jobs in Ontario and Quebec.
The energy-producing facility collects a volume of usable landfill gas that's equivalent to more than 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases, which would otherwise be wasted as methane vented into the atmosphere. The landfill gas is burned in GE Jenbacher engines to create power so Moose Creek Tire Recycling can recycle up to 25,000 tonnes of tires into useful recycled products.
The products include not only Animat's protective barn carpets, but also other rubber products, such as the protectors that keep people's skates from getting dulled at hockey rinks when they walk from the dressing room to the ice.
"There are about 100 car tires per tonne," Laflèche says, which means a substantial portion of the 12 million tires that are scrapped every year in Ontario can be repurposed at his facility alone. The tonnage doesn't translate directly into car tires, he adds, because Moose Creek specializes in taking in tires from big mining and off-road vehicle tires.
"It helps us achieve volume, and there aren't a lot of people who will take them," he says.
It's more than a matter of merely melting the tires to create recycled products. The Moose Creek facility begins by cutting up the tires, then shredding them into either two or four pieces, depending on the size of the tire. "Then it's all granulated and then we use magnets to remove all the steel," Laflèche explains.
"After that we separate the nylon fibre from the rubber. Most of the rubber ends up in silos, gyms and arenas [in the recycled products].
Laflèche says he saw the opportunity to do something about used tires in the early 2000s, when the provincial government was considering a plan to gather the material and burn it in controlled settings. He actually had owned the landfill that is now used to supply the GE Jenbacher generators that supply his recycling facility, so he understood environmental issues.
The issue with tires was that nobody had thought of how to reuse such a large supply of used ones. The controlled burn idea was considered because of worries after a stockpile of tires caught fire in Hagersville, Ont., in 1990, burning uncontrollably for 17 days and spewing toxic smoke across the province.
"I saw that a lot of roadbeds used gravel, which had to be cut and moved. Why not use tire chips?" Mr. Laflèche says.
Moose Creek's liftoff was made possible by the Ontario Tire Stewardship (OTS) program, started in 2009. The OTS is an organization that works with haulers, processors and recyclers to make sure used tires get to facilities like Laflèche's. Ontario residents who buy new tires are asked to turn in their old ones and must pay a small recycling fee (around $5 per tire for ordinary car tires) to fund the program.
"I had the idea for a long time, but it had to be feasible, and OTS made it feasible," he says.
In many ways the fulfillment of his dream represents the fulfillment of the promise offered by the environmental movement when it started to take hold in the early 1970s. While there are now generations of trained scientists, engineers and innovators working on environmental issues, the movement began with people like him simply wondering about possibilities.
"I started out as a cheesemaker when I quit school, then I became a miner. Then around 1974 I saw a documentary on TV about environmental problems in Europe," he explains.
"I got to thinking that this is going to reach us here someday, and I have ideas." The result? Look at the promotional material for the barn mats: "You can see how happy the cow is."
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This content was produced by The Globe and Mail's advertising department, in consultation with GE. The Globe's editorial department was not involved in its creation.