Howard Levy, president of Fleetwood-based Used Tires Inc. (UTI), has seen both sides of the boom and bust. aBut at the moment it’s a good time to have a commodity – used tires – that many budget conscious consumers look to when the cost of a tire can seem daunting.
“The used tire market is very busy, both domestic and foreigh – but especially dometic, because of the conomy,” Mr. Levy told Tire Business. “We sell ‘em as fast as we can get ‘ em.”
UTI, which formerly had its headquarters in Deerfield Beach, Fla., relocated its base to Fleetwood about three years ago. Mr. Levy said it moved largely to run the tire-derived fuel (TDF) programs for Candence Environmental Energy Inc. and Lehigh Cement Co., a sub-sidiary of the Heidelberg Cement Group.
Cadence and Lehigh burn whole passenger and light truck tires in their kilns, and between them use close to 3 million units annually, according to Mr. Levy.
Used tires, meanwhile are in short supply, especially in the 13-, 14-, and 15-inch size. Other sizes are also in demand, but the smaller passenger tires are nearly impossible to keep in stock, he noted.
According to its website, UTI has been in business since 1982 and selling tires online since 1997. While the company still does business in Florida, the bulk of its business – thanks to the TDF segment – is now in Pennsylvania, with UTI selling containers of used tires to local shops in the Philadelphia, Newark and New York City areas, Mr. Levy said.
In the 1990s, UTI – then known as Used Tire International Inc. – made the news for its fight against Puerto Rico’s Tire Handling Act, which would have destroyed UTI’s used tire exporting business there.
The Tire Handling Act banned the importation of used tires to Puerto Rico, which UTI held was discriminatory against interstate commerce.
The Puerto Rico federal district court issued an injunction against enforcement of the Tire Handling Act in September 1997. In September 1998, the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the injunction.
The law, the appeals court stated, essentially placed on commercial enterprises the burden of conserving Puerto Rico’s remaining landfill space. Because the U.S. territory failed to show there were no alternatives to this, the law clearly violated the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the court ruled.
Today, according to Mr. Levy, UTI has other government related concerns – namely, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) pending final rules on emissions from industrial boilers and solid waste incinerators.
The rule promulgated in March 2011 gave tire recyclers a reprieve in that it exempted scrap tires gathered from an acknowledged collection program from the requirement that all metal be removed from tires before burning. That requirement would have made TDF prohibitively expensive, The recycling industry claimed.
However, the EPA’s proposed changes to the boiler rule in December 2011 put TDF back in play as far as cement kilns are concerned, Mr. Levy said. “To stop that would be to go backward in time 20 years.”
Even the March 2011 rule is problematic to extent, he said, explaining: “I couldn’t accept material here if it came from a landfill.”
Aside from the EPA rule, the biggest potent problem tire recyclers face today is the export baled scrap tires, Mr. Levy said.
