Revisiting Rubber

We recently filmed a factory that turned ground-up rubber from tires into flooring for gyms and sidewalks (see blog entry Where the Road Meets the Rubber). What we didn’t have was footage of the tires actually being ground-up.



Thanks – yet again – to Lindsay of Rubber Sidewalks, we finished off the week by visiting Golden By-Products outside of Turlock, CA.



The family-run business used to focus on almond farming (which is evident by the trees that line the plant) but now recycle more than 4 million tires a year.



Jana walked us through the process.



All the tires are first sorted and rims are removed before they meet Jaws.



This machine slices the tough material into manageable pieces that then ride the conveyer belts to further grinding.



These piles of rubber chips then go through another process where the metal and nylon are removed and sold for scrap.



Some of the rubber is then milled until a fine powder that can be used in most molding technologies.



Larger rubber chunks are colored and bagged on site into a product called Rubber Bark.



It’s a replacement for wood mulch in gardens since it never needs replacing, eliminates insects and according to the advertising never flies or floats away.



Cryptic Moth also filmed Rubber Bark being applied to local playgrounds. According to the school’s principal, the spongy material reduced knee scrapes outside but pieces did find their way – via pockets – into many classrooms.



Golden By-Products are also looking into selling rubber scrap as a fuel source but are wary of new tire designs that include gels and plastic linings - materials that clog up or pollute the recycling process.



Cryptic Moth wishes them luck.

Out.

G+I

Ocean Plastic Analyzed

Cryptic Moth left San Francisco for Stockton, CA on Thursday.



Stockton is home to the University of the Pacific and we were visiting Dr. Lorena, Visiting Chemical Researcher in the area of environmental pollutants.



Dr. Lorena’s early work focused mainly on contaminants found in soil but when she met Captain Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, she discovered a whole new material: plastic.



If you’ve seen the short movie (see Internet Debut of Alphabet Soup), you know that plastics attract oily chemicals like DDT and PCB’s. If a marine mammal eats some of that plastic, then the toxins accumulate in the tissues over time and can be passed up the food chain.



Dr. Lorena accepted the challenge of measuring the toxins found in plastic that Charlie collected from the North Pacific Central Gyre in 2003 as well as last summer’s Alphabet Soup visit.



She continues to be alarmed by the findings.



It was no surprise that visibly older pieces of plastic had more accumulation (some plastic can float for more than 50 years)...



...but how the smaller pieces showed higher levels of contaminants. These are the pieces that could be mistaken for food.



A large number of samples showed high levels of everything from pesticides to gasoline to flame retardants (and that’s not including the compounds within the plastic). By “high levels,” we learned that these plastic samples were on par with soil tested in busy Chinese shipping ports.



But unlike contaminated soil or sediment that can lay undisturbed or only impact a few bottom-dwelling species, synthetics travel freely through every ocean habitat. And that – according to Dr. Lorena – is the problem.



Out.

I+G