Hanover
He reached down for another piece of wood and tossed it into the fireplace, a stone fireplace he built with his own hands in the corner of the building, which he also built with his own hands. It was cold outside and the howling wind pounded across the sage-dotted Colorado prairie, but within a minute the small fire filled the entire building with a warm glow.
Brian Wilde, formerly in the oil and gas business, a guy with a degree and a solid background in finance and economics, gazed out at his future through one of the small windows: 20 million old tires stretched out toward the horizon.
Wilde, co-owner of Midway Tire Recycling, hopes to turn the unfathomable sea of tires into cash. When he peers outside he sees black gold. Much of it, of course, with whitewalls.
He bought into the tire-recycling business six years ago. Now, five or six days a week, he commutes 111 miles each way from his home in south Denver to this tire wasteland off Interstate 25, three miles north of the line separating Pueblo and El Paso counties.
With a 222-mile commute, Wilde, as you’d imagine, wears out a staggering number of tires on his truck. On a brighter note, he has a pretty good idea where to chuck them when the time comes. Right out there on his lot. With the other 220,000 tons of old tires – based on an average of 22 pounds per tire.
How does Wilde know the average weight of a tire?
“From having picked up a helluva lot of them,” he said, laughing.
The tires are weighed on truck scales as they’re hauled in, usually in the bed of 18-wheelers, discards collected from tire shops in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Texas. Wilde charges about $50 per ton to take the old tires. (Most Colorado landfills charge more. And a state law passed a few years ago bans new landfills designed exclusively for old tires.)
Starting next week, when he expects a massive 800-horsepower, $500,000 tire shredder called a Hogzilla to be delivered, Wilde plans to start selling the chipped rubber for about $55 a ton. Currently, the shredding takes place at another facility north of Denver owned by Wilde and his partner.
Chipped-tire chunks are becoming common throughout Colorado.
“A growing use is on playgrounds,” said Don Sandoval, the manager of the Colorado Department of Local Affairs’ Waste Tire Program. “It’s also mixed with soil as a base for football and soccer fields. And it’s used as a topping, like soil, for the latest athletic fields that are a blend of real and artificial grass.”
Recycled tires are mixed into running tracks and new roads and are also used as fuel.
“It burns much hotter than coal,” Wilde said. “Coal has a heat value of about 8,000 BTUs per pound. Rubber has a heat value of 16,000 BTUs per pound.”
Across the nation, shredded-tire fuel powers kilns in some cement factories. It’s also used in pulp and paper mills and even power plants. In Colorado, one cement plant in Florence and another in Lyons are licensed by the state to burn rubber, along with coal, in their kilns, according to Sandoval.
Wilde got into the business with a plan to build a rubber-fired power plant, the fuel coming from his vast treasure of old tires. Negotiations with energy giant Xcel Energy broke down, he said. These days, Wilde sits in his small office when it’s cold, piles tires into mountains with a bulldozer when it’s not, takes in a few new loads of old tires each day – and waits. For his Hogzilla shredder to arrive. And for the market to keep expanding.
“I see a day where I sell the shredded rubber as fast as I can take it in,” he said.
Which might disappoint his sons Cole, 10, and Tanner, 14, who hang out with their dad at the tire graveyard once in a while, entertaining themselves by heaving tires and – this is their favorite – rolling them down the hills of the prairie.
Wilde laughs.
“Just imagine two boys turned loose with 20 million tires,” he said.
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
