A great place to re-tire.

In Saskatchewan, the town where the rubber meets the road is arguably Assiniboia. That's because this southwestern community is home to one of the largest rubber recycling plants in Canada.

Prairie Rubber Corporation can recycle approximately 350 tires an hour over a 20-hour workday. The tires can end up in a variety of items including: hose, mats, carpet underlay, asphalt for paving purposes, crack sealers, new tire production, rubber/ plastic extrusion, injection molding, children's playgrounds, and sport surfaces.

Marc Topola, regional manager, says the company had its origins as an economic development idea in 1996 by Assiniboia's Economic Development Department. The town felt that since the province did not have a used tire recycling facility and its location was close to the American border, the community could support a viable operation.

The department began looking for a corporation that would be interested in establishing a plant in the community and eventually discovered Recovery Technologies Inc. of Cambridge Ontario, which is now owned by Recovery Technologies Group (RTG) Inc. This company, headquartered in Guttenberg, New Jersey, has an extensive network of collection, transfer, processing and crumb rubber manufacturing facilities throughout North America. It is the largest tire recycler in the world.

Working in partnership with the Assiniboia Economic Development Department, RTG purchased a shredder, one of the key components in the recycling process, in 1998. Two years later construction on the plant was completed, and it features some of the most technologically-advanced equipment in the industry. Today it is one of the area's largest employers with 36 people on the payroll.

Jim Anderson, President of RTG Canada, says the process used in Assiniboia is clean and environmentally friendly. "Most of our plants use cryogenic lines. Prairie Rubber Corp. is the first one we have which doubles up using both cryogenic and ambient lines," he says.

In layman's terms, once the tires have been moved to the processing part of the plant, the steel beads are removed from the tires, which are then fed through the primary shredder. This process reduces the tire to chips, approximately two inches in diameter.

The tire chips are then fed into the main freezing chamber where Liquid nitrogen is used to cool the chips to -100[degrees]C. The chips, which become very brittle, are broken into tiny particles by two hammer mills.

The metal and the fiber are then removed and the particles are sized, sorted and bagged. Any oversized material is returned to the system for additional processing.

RTG has an international marketing division, which oversees sales for its subsidiaries. "Most of it ends tip in the United States," says Anderson. "It is mostly used as artificial tuff, but it is also used for playground asphalt and by mat manufacturers. We may use some of our rubber in the asphalt in Saskatchewan next year." The leftover steel products are extracted with magnets and sold to steel manufacturers.

Prairie Rubber Corp. receives its tires from the Saskatchewan Scrap Tire Corporation, a nonprofit, non-government agency that manages the voluntary provincial tire recycling program. It collects the recycling fees that tire retailers charge consumers and then pays organizations such as Prairie Rubber Corp. to recycle them into useful products.

The used tires are usually picked up at tire retailers and then hauled to Prairie Rubber Corp. It recycles about 1.2 million tires annually, which is about the annual production of scrap tires in the province.

"There is a general rule in North America that one scrap tire is generated per person per year. Those are tires from cars, trucks, agricultural vehicles and so on. So, if there are about 31 million people in Canada, then we figure there are about 31 million tires," says Anderson.

As a unique venture in Saskatchewan, Prairie Rubber has received considerable public attention. In 2001, Prince Charles toured the plant, which brought an international focus to the plant. It also received an Achievement in Business Excellence (ABEX) Award from the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce in 2002 for the best new venture.