A teacher once said to me that technology would one day allow us to go back and mine all of our landfills for resources.
Landfills would be the gold mines of the future because of their high concentration of quality resources in a small footprint.
Can you imagine how much plastic could be mined out of the landfills for L.A. or New York City?
The very essence of any stereotypical landfill or junkyard has got to be abandoned or discarded tires piled up all over the place. Closed loop rubber recycler Magnum D’Or Resources hopes to change this image, and boy does it have plenty of raw material to work with — approximately 56 percent of all the rubber produced in 2005 went into making tires.
Along with its partner, Sekhar Research Innovations (SRI), Magnum shreds up and recycles discarded tires into a powder that can be converted back into reusable products. At the end of it all, 100 percent of the stuff that Magnum processes is produced into a reusable material that winds up in all sorts of different applications, including everything from non-slip flooring on a dock to horse trailer or equestrian flooring to loose fill rubber mulch that could be used on a playground to even motorcycle tires. Its primary processing and production facility today is in Magog, Quebec, a facility that holds approximately $130 million in open contracts for the production of rubber nuggets and rubber buffing.
Chad Curtis, chairman, president and CEO of Magnum D’Or, says the most ambitious project the company has taken on to date is the clean-up of one of the largest tire landfills in North America (if not the world), which is situated in Hudson, Colo. The “inventory” at the 120-acre site is roughly 35 million tires. Magnum is also working with the city and county of Denver to clean up illegally dumped scraps and waste tires across the region, which have been dumped randomly.
Magnum took over the site in August and within the past 30 days has removed more than half a million tires in the first pit, according to Curtis. “If our site in Magog is a mouse, then this site could only be described as an elephant,” he says.
So, Colorado gets rid of an environmentally nasty eyesore, while Magnum gets the raw materials for all sorts of stuff it can turn into the next generation of rubber products.
