Keep Port St. Lucie Beautiful
KPSLB visits Liberty Tire Recycling of Port St. Lucie, where road-worn tires are shredded and ready to roll into new products
Keep Port St. Lucie Beautiful and the Office of Solid Waste toured the Liberty Tire Recycling Facility on Range Line Road this month with Keep Florida Beautiful’ s Sherry Carpenter.
Our tour took us through the entire facility, while our incredibly knowledgeable tour guide and Liberty supervisor Rick Douglas explained how the recycling process worked from start to finish: from receiving tire shipments from all over the state, including the St. Lucie County Landfill, stripping the nylon fiber and metal away from the rubber, sorting the tires based on type and quality, removing the rims and shredding the rubber into the many different sizes of crumb, depending on its future purpose.
Liberty Tire Recycling has 38 plants nationwide and is responsible for recycling 2 / 3 of the tires in the U. S., more than 215 million tires annually! The Port St. Lucie division of Liberty Tire Recycling recycled 76,000 tons of tires in 2024, which means 6.7 million tires were processed at this facility last year!
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Illegally dumped tires are reported to the Office of Solid Waste and then retrieved by the KPSLB Litter Crew or OSW Coordinators
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Tires are collected at St. Lucie County Landfill then sent to Liberty Tire Recycling in Port St. Lucie
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Tires are sorted by type and quality. Some are resold as high-quality used tires. Rims are removed and scrapped for steel and aluminum
Wire is removed from rubber and recycled into products like rebar. Rubber is shredded into various sizes depending on quality and future use
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Applications include sound control and construction materials, landscaping products, fuel, aggregate, playground surfaces, and welcome mats
www
. CityofPSL. com / KPSLB • 772-871-7000 • KPSLB @ cityofpsl. com
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