'Green rubber'
Tire recycling plant coming to Gallup

Piles of used tires cover the ground Wednesday at the Red Rocks Regional Landfill near Thoreau. Officials at the landfill estimate they have nearly one-half million tires and an additional 40,000 to 50,000 tires are added each year. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — When Rick Homans heard of Malaysia-based Petra Group's new DeLink technology a patented, waste-free process that reverts old tires back to "green" rubber he thought it was too good to be true.

So Homans, the former director of the state's Spaceport Authority and its one time economic development secretary, flew to the company's Kuala Lumpur headquarters to see for himself.

What Homans saw convinced him. As president of Petra's new U.S. subsidiary, Green Rubber Global, he's helping launch the group's first plant in Gallup. Local city and county officials expect major economic rewards.

"It's the first major industry to come to Gallup in a long time," said Gallup Mayor Harry Mendoza, who signed off on a memorandum of understanding with Green Rubber in Albuquerque Wednesday.

Homans said the project could bring up to 150 new jobs to New Mexico, all but 15 or so of them to Gallup. The rest will staff the company's Albuquerque headquarters. At an average hourly rate of $15, Mendoza said, the jobs could add as much as $2 million to Gallup's payroll.

The company wanted to break ground at the east end site it's picked out for the plant Thursday, Mendoza said, "so they really want to move on this thing."

"We would like to be operational by July 1 of 2008," Homans said.

But with Green Rubber's architects still finalizing the designs, the mayor said six weeks was a more realistic goal.

Once it's up and running, said New Mexico Economic Development Commissioner George Muoz, who helped negotiate the state grant that made a deal with Green Rubber possible, "this will be the first plant in the world ... of this kind."

The road to Gallup
Green Rubber had a number of cities vying for its business, Homans said, "but we wanted to go where we were most wanted and needed."

With the nearby Pittsburgh & Midway coal mine set to close next year and put some 300 people out of work, he added, it was clear that "Gallup wanted and needed the jobs."

The city and county made Green Rubber's decision easier by each putting up $500,000 to build the plant. With Muoz's help, they also convinced Gov. Bill Richardson to throw in another $2.9 million from his discretionary fund. The city also put up the land, the old Boardman salvage yard along Hasler Valley Road. After building the plant, the city will lease it to the company over the next 10 years with an option to buy in five.

Local officials had been talking with Petra at least since May 2, when they met with actor Mel Gibson, who is backing the project financially, and a cadre of company representatives in Gallup.

Until Wednesday's public announcement, they'd said nothing since. But according to Mendoza and Muoz, those talks almost fell through when the company failed to come to terms with Gamerco Associates over the use of its land and an available building. By putting up city land, and convincing the governor to up his original $1 million commitment, they said, the talks were saved.

"This just goes to show what you can do working together," the mayor said.

Parting with the past
Rubber, Homans said, can be an unruly substance unprocessed. It wasn't until Charles Goodyear came along in the mid-1800s that the industry finally figured out how to make it both more durable and elastic. In a process called vulcanization, Goodyear managed to link its long carbon chains together with sulfur bonds. Homans described the carbon chains as the sides of a ladder and the bonds as the rungs.

But with some one billion tires going to waste each year, that same process has proven the bane of many an environmentalist. Until now, the closest they've come to recycling the stuff is to ground the tires into powder. But the rubber stays vulcanized, and the product has limited use.

That's where DeLink comes in. As its name implies, the chemical actually de-links the carbon chains, turning the powder back to the rubber it started as.

For all the technology's novelty, Homans said, "it's incredibly simple."

For every 100 parts powdered or crumb rubber, the process takes two parts of the chemical. Machines mix the combination for eight minutes, he said, "and what comes out the other side ... is green rubber."

Other companies are working on their own methods of devulcanizing rubber, but Petra calls its breakthrough the first to be commercially viable and emissions and waste free. The chemical the company uses to break the sulfur bonds, Homans said, gets absorbed into the rubber.

"It's a completely clean, benign and harmless process," he said.

Finding a market
That's good news for Steve Barela, director of the Red Rock Landfill in Thoreau, where Grants, Gallup, Milan and Cibola and McKinley Counties all take their trash.

Some 50,000 tires end up at the landfill each year. An outfit out of Dexter, Texas takes about 1,500 of them off his hands a month to recycle the old fashioned way. The rest he buries.

"We have half a million tires out there," he said, "so this would really help."

Green Rubber could use them all. It doesn't have a number pinned down just yet, but Homans said the plant could end up recycling as many as six million tires a year.

Whatever the number, he's expecting no shortage of buyers. Homans said the rubber the plant will produce could be used for just about anything rubber goes into now, from swimming fins to auto tubing.

During Wednesday's announcement in Albuquerque, Mendoza recalled, "a reporter asked, 'Show me something you can make out of the product.' Mel Gibson takes his shoe off, pointed to its sole, and said, 'This.'"

Muoz said he's already received two calls from companies interested in Green Rubber's product. Mendoza hopes some will want to relocate to Gallup, bringing even more jobs with them.

"If this thing goes through, I think it's going to mushroom," he said.

Homans has the same hopes for Green Rubber. He said the company's goal is to build six to eight more plant in the coming years across the country.