I do business with a trucking company and scrap yard in Idaho.
They have a machine that removes the plastic casing from Romex wire cuts it up in 1/8” long pieces and spits it into a bin. The bins stop filling up at 4000 pounds. They put 64,000 on a maxi flatbed and haul it over to Oregon twice a month. That truckload is worth over $300K at the smelter.
They also crush cars and sell for scrap.
They also recycle Catalytic Converters. A 55 gallon drum of the rare earth metals separated from the other metal parts is worth $12K. The warehouse where the machine separates those CC is monitored 24/7. The most valuable CC is on a Ford Expedition. It has two that are worth $650 each.
A thief can cut those off your SUV in about two minutes with a battery operated sawzall.
They recently started recycling tires into shredded rubber.
They is a lot of money in scrap.
“They recently started recycling tires into shredded rubber.”
Mix them into asphalt for roads. Maybe concrete too.
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Yes—shredded tire rubber is being mixed into both asphalt and some types of concrete, and it’s become a significant reuse pathway for scrap tires.
In asphalt
Ground tire rubber (often called crumb rubber) is blended with asphalt binder to make rubberized asphalt, which is widely used for road surfaces in states like California, Arizona, and others.
This mix can make pavements more durable, reduce cracking, cut road noise, and extend the time between resurfacing, while also consuming millions of waste tires per year.
In concrete and road bases
Researchers and some pilot projects use finely shredded tire rubber or tire fibers inside concrete mixes to improve crack resistance and ductility; one optimized mix used about 0.35% tire fibers by volume.
Crumb rubber or tire chips can also be blended with crushed concrete rubble for road base layers, creating a 100% recycled material for the foundation under asphalt.
Trade‑offs and performance
Rubberized concrete often shows less cracking and better vibration damping, but if too much sand or aggregate is replaced with rubber, compressive strength drops, so practical mixes typically keep rubber content below roughly 10–15% by volume.
Overall, these uses help divert tires from landfills and support more sustainable road and infrastructure construction, though most real-world use today is still in asphalt rather than structural concrete.