While no specific chemical hazards from recycled tires in playground surfacing are known by the CPSC at this time, the following precautions to limit exposure are recommended: Avoid mouth contact with playground surfacing materials, including mouthing, chewing, or swallowing playground rubber.
Recycled tire products are safe for consumers
Provided that you are not the one processing the tires yourself (more on that later), there is an extremely low toxicity risk in tire chips.
Even though tire rubber is not toxic to users, owners are ultimately responsible for the products they purchase and install.
Some of the toxins in rubber tire crumb include VOC's, PAH's, MBT's, and latex. The EPA has found these chemicals cause cancer, headaches, nausea, contact dermatitis, and allergies.
Ground rubber also contains a class of chemicals called Polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) that many studies have found extremely toxic to humans and the environment. Research has also found that the toxicity of leachate from the rubber tire mulch increases over time as the rubber breaks down.
While no specific chemical hazards from recycled tires in playground surfacing are known by the CPSC at this time, the following precautions to limit exposure are recommended: Avoid mouth contact with playground surfacing materials, including mouthing, chewing, or swallowing playground rubber.
The manufacture of synthetic rubber involves several chemical compounds which are toxic to man.
Analysis of the vapours that are released from tires reveals the presence of numerous compounds that constitute the “tire smell.” Some of these, mostly those emanating from the hydrocarbon oils, are potentially toxic. Some, like benzopyrene, are carcinogenic.
Today tires consist of about 19 percent natural rubber and 24 percent synthetic rubber, which is a plastic polymer. The rest is made up of metal and other compounds.
Run-Flat Technology
Run-flat tires allow drivers to travel approximately 50 miles at 50 miles per hour or less to reach a safe location after a tire sustains complete air loss due to a puncture or cut. Modern touring tires like the Bridgestone DriveGuard use run-flat technology as an added safety benefit.
The material can contain heavy metals like lead and manganese, volatile organic compounds like toluene, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The chemicals are associated with cancer and other illnesses at certain levels of exposure.
... Pollution has been identified as one of the risks to Great Crested Newt populations here in the UK (Foster et al. 2021). Rubber tires are dangerous to most aquatic organisms, due to their ability to leach toxic chemicals such as zinc, rubber polymers, and vulcanization chemicals (Wik 2007) .
Recycling: once steel and any other excess material is removed, rubber from tyres can be shredded and ground into a new material called crumb rubber, used in a surprising variety of products.
Although tires are almost half rubber, the rubber can't simply be melted down and reused as many polymers can be. That's because the rubber is vulcanized—cross-linked with sulfur in a process invented by Charles Goodyear in 1839. Vulcanization imparts needed mechanical properties but is not easily reversed.
Shredded tires, known as Tire Derived Aggregate (TDA), have many civil engineering applications. TDA can be used as a back-fill for retaining walls, fill for landfill gas trench collection wells, back-fill for roadway landslide repair projects as well as a vibration damping material for railway lines.
Although rubber is the main material used in tires, there are many others. Some tires are composed of as many as 200 different raw materials, which are combined with rubber compounds to create the various components of a tire's construction.
Today, tires are not made of rubber entirely, but a mix of chemicals and materials combined for optimal performance. Only about a third the composition of a tire is natural rubber, with textiles, fillers and cables making up the weight.
60% of rubber used in the tire industry is synthetic rubber, produced from petroleum-derived hydrocarbons, although natural rubber is still necessary for the remaining 40%.
The Hazards Of Rubber
It also creates sneezing, breathing difficulties and coughing. More severely, if someone has a high concentration exposure to such fumes, it can create lung damage and even cancer or other serious hazards. Rubber has a lot of carcinogens used in its production.
Scrap tires have oily chemicals that are flammable, and tire fires create injury hazards. Burning tires also release hazardous chemicals, such as polycyclic aeromatic hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds, and toxic metals, into air, water, and soil.
Consistent with previous studies, N-nitrosamines exposures in the rubber industry, were associated with mortality from cancers of the bladder, lung, stomach, leukaemia, multiple myeloma, oesophagus, prostate, pancreas and liver.
Rubber is durable, and more eco-friendly than plastic. It lasts longer, and stands up better against heat and cold than plastics. It's safer for your products, too, with no estrogen-mimicking toxins like BPA to worry about.
Nitrosamines in the rubber-manufacturing industry are formed in the vulcanising process, with its extensive use of chemicals such as tetramethyl thiuram disulfide, zinc-diethyldithiocarbamate and morpholinomercaptobenzothiazole.
Rubber recycling refers to processing irreparably damaged or worn-down (natural or synthetic) rubber products for new use to prevent rubber waste from ending up in a landfill.