NEWPORT, Ind. — Tire recycler J&R Used Tire Service Inc. is opening a tire-shredding facility in Newport primarily to supply feedstock to a carbon-black recovery plant being built in nearby Terre Haute, Ind.
J&R invested $2.15 million to develop the new plant in Newport's Vermillion Rise Mega Park, with operations scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2019, according to Rodney Rogers, owner.
J&R put the facility's shredding capacity at 350,000 passenger tires a month. The 23,000-sq.-ft. plant should create up to 40 jobs in Indiana by year-end 2022.
The company, which is moving to Newport from Danville, Ill., singled out Pyrolyx A.G. — a German company that's building a recovered carbon black (rCB) plant in Terre Haute — as a primary customer for its tire shreds.
Pyrolyx expects the new plant, rated at 13,000 metric tons of carbon black a year at full capacity, to start operations in June 2019.
The factory's pyrolysis process also will recover oil and steel and save more than 30,000 tons of CO2 annually, compared with traditional carbon black processing, the company claimed.
J&R said other end-uses for its shredded tires include alternative daily coverage for landfills and tire-derived fuel for cement kilns. The company also is a key supplier of rubber rings — the cut-out sidewalls of truck tires — that are used to weigh down construction barrels and cones.
J&R is hiring a variety of positions, including operators, warehouse, maintenance and driver positions. Some of the jobs at the new plant will be filled by workers employed at J&R's existing processing plant in Danville, Mr. Rogers said, but at least half should be new hires.
Mr. Rogers said the new facility can handle tires up to small OTR sized and can produce about any size chip requested.
J&R handles its own used/scrap tire collection network, running a fleet of box trucks to customers throughout Indiana and Illinois and into neighboring states as well, Mr. Rogers said. His company is a licensed scrap tire hauler in seven states, he said.
For larger customers, J&R has 250 semi-trailers that it parks at their sites; when full, J&R picks them up.
The Indiana Economic Development Corp. offered J&R up to $300,000 in conditional tax credits based on the company's job creation plans. The Vermillion Rise Mega Park, a 7,000-acre industrial facility in west central Indiana, offered additional, undisclosed incentives.
Mr. Rogers was highly complimentary of Indiana and its efforts to attract business.
J&R made headlines in the region five years ago when its facility in Hoopeston, Ill., was destroyed by fire. Mr. Rogers said that experience prompted him to rethink his business model, which now is based on processing all incoming tires on a daily basis so as to avoid having to stockpile any inventory.