# Talking Tires Podcast

**Welcome to Talking Tires, the podcast that delves deep into the world of tires.** Join us as we explore everything from the science behind tire manufacturing to the latest innovations in tire recycling. Our aim is to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of tires, including how they work, how to maintain them, and how to dispose of them responsibly. Whether you’re a seasoned mechanic, curious car enthusiast, or an avid recycler, Talking Tires is the perfect podcast for anyone who wants to learn about this essential component of the modern vehicle and heavy equipment. So, buckle up and join us for an informative and engaging journey into the world of tires.

**Craig Hunter:** All right, welcome back to another episode of Talking Tires. I’m your host, Craig Hunter, the president of Tire Reclaim. I’m here with Chris Gabriil Chickic of Gilead Dynamics.

**Chris:** Yes, sorry, that’s a mouthful. That’s a good one, but we got through it. Hey, I really wanted to have you on. We got all kinds of technologies represented here at the Tire Recycling Foundation 10th annual conference. We’re really glad to be here set up doing live podcasts and we’ve got Chris here to talk a little bit about pyrolysis. It’s not the most common theme you hear a lot about. There’s crumb molding, a lot of guys here about shredders and shredding, but you bring something a little new to the table. I’m pretty excited to learn about it. So welcome.

**Chris:** Well, thank you and thank you for having me on the show.

**Craig:** You bet. So, something you know, one thing before we get into products too much. Let’s hear about Chris. There’s got to be a way everybody has some kind of weird story or something that happened. How did you fall into tires and tire recycling as a potential?

**Chris:** So, I was a person who sold industrial lubricants. I went into plants and found solutions to pain points for them. Eventually, I ended up making a product for Navistar and then made a retail product and built a company called Lubrication Specialties. We had…

**Craig:** Where at Mount Gilead, Ohio.

**Chris:** And we made a product that ended up becoming a retail product called Hot Shot Secret. It was focused on diesel owners, semi-truck drivers, pickup truck owners. We built a professional-grade product and put it on the shelf. And it took off and was very successful. The company grew, we were on the shelf at Walmart, AutoZone, any retailer, and rural crane tractor supply. We also built products for race car drivers. We’ve got six of the six diesel world records. So, if you’re a diesel racer, like the world’s fastest diesel truck, world’s fastest diesel pickup, they’re all Hot Shot Secret drivers.

During this process, while we’re building our factory, we have a factory with blending facilities, a million-dollar research and development lab, and we do packaging, sales, as well as marketing all in Mount Gilead. We have two plants: a distribution plant and a manufacturing plant. We stumbled onto this microwave idea about seven, eight years ago.

**Craig:** Yeah, I can see the lead-in, right? It kind of makes sense.

**Chris:** It was strange. Our chemical engineer used to work for the fellow that was trying to perfect the microwave processing of tires and after I had hired him and bought his company, which was an antifreeze recycling company, we were sitting around drinking beers one day after work and talking about how it worked.

Everything always starts with a couple of beers.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And a napkin’s usually involved.

**Chris:** There were napkins. We’re sketching. And he was telling me what they were trying to do, which was microwave the tire shreds and turn them into carbon black. It was a batch system. I said, “You know, that doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. It seems like you should be able to take the processing plant to the tires because transporting the tires is a pain.” So, we’re sitting there again drinking a couple of beers and we got out graph paper. See, we’re going from the napkin to graph paper.

**Craig:** I like it. Upgrade.

**Chris:** And I said, “Hey, would this fit on a 53 ft semi-truck trailer flatbed?” So, we’re Googling how big is, you know, a microwave oven, how big would a nitrogen generator be? How big would an air compressor?

**Craig:** We’re not talking about warming up your burritos at the gas station. These microwaves are sure…

**Chris:** Yeah. 200 kW.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Chris:** But dimension-wise, they’re the size of a freezer.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Chris:** Like a home freezer. But there’s wave guides, like ductwork that takes them and puts them into the oven itself. So, the generator, the motor is the size of a freezer or your refrigerator at home. The oven itself is about 12 feet long with three compartments.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Chris:** So, we’re sitting there sketching this out. Then we start cutting out little cardboard cutouts and putting them on there. It’s like, “Hey, this would work.”

**Craig:** So, what would it take? Well, we have to hire an engineer that’s a microwave engineer to kind of put it together. So, we did that. Then we hired another engineering company to design the whole thing out and make blueprints. And then it was, “Okay, now we’re really into it.” I thought somebody would buy the idea at that point. And everybody I presented it to said, “Yeah, well, it’s way too much risk for me. You build it and then we’ll buy it.”

**Chris:** So, let me slow you down just a little bit. So, what would you call that process? Do have you decided on a name? I mean, it’s got to be tire shred, microwave, carbon black, something about the process. What would you call that process?

**Chris:** We called it the machine. We started calling it the tire hog.

**Craig:** The tire hog.

**Chris:** And it just popped. It’s we didn’t have an official marketing name or anything. It was just there’s no website. It was just us working on it.

**Craig:** All right.

**Chris:** Eventually, the pyrolysis. That’s the best way.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s just pyrolysis using microwaves instead of traditional heat.

**Chris:** Okay.

**Chris:** So, the idea was from the scientific papers that we read that heating up the rubber from the inside out was a better way to do it because you do less damage to the carbon. Most of the people that we’ve seen were tumbling it like you would asphalt and introducing direct indirect air like basically a dryer. So, as you’re tumbling it, you’re basically beating it up and compressing it. Our process, you’re running it through the microwave, you’re evaporating all the hydrocarbons, and it comes out looking exactly like it did when it went in. There’s literally no difference. If I had a pile of both, you couldn’t tell. But when you pick up the product, you can crunch it between your fingers, it turns to dust. You’ve evaporated all the hydrocarbons. Then we run it through three condensers and it separates out the oil and the gas. The oil, of course, is recollected then the gas we send into a gas generator which powers a whole plant.

**Craig:** Right. And you talked about that being self-sufficient as far as energy goes.

**Chris:** The idea was to have two 53 ft semi-truck trailers that could pull up, be connected within 8 hours with four guys, and running. The second day you’re actually running the process and being totally self-sufficient. We use propane to start the generator. Once it’s started, then we got everything warmed up. The gas coming off powers the whole plant.

**Craig:** That sounds great.

**Chris:** Well, the vision was to make tires valuable. Like right now, the last talk I had just gone to was about grants and regulation and how we can keep people from throwing tires away. Well, we don’t throw aluminum cans away. Why? Because it’s easy to recycle, right? Once they became easy to recycle, we started doing it all the time. You know, back in the 70s, everybody’s throwing them out the window. Now they get recycled. Well, what if we could make every tire worth $5 or $10?

**Craig:** That’s the same goal I have, right? Increase the market value of tires and tire products and then you can eventually pay just like I want to call it the tin can of tires someday. I really do.

**Chris:** Well, that was our goal. It’s like if we could make this affordable for everybody and bring entrepreneurs into it instead of making it a government-initiated process. I mean the government dollars can only go so far and I’m not faulting them. They’re doing a great job as far as trying to push the needle.

**Craig:** You know, each one of our units should be able to produce between $2 and $3 million worth of net profit per year. And that is based off of the carbon black sales, oil sales,

**Chris:** The carbon black and the oil because you consume most of the gas. All the gas gets consumed. The amount of power needed to run microwaves is significant.

**Craig:** Right. So, what’s the power requirement?

**Chris:** Yeah. So, we’re right now able to run two tons per hour. We could run one ton an hour. We want to get to two tons. The engineering team we have working on it said that’s very feasible. There’s no reason we can’t. When you see how much gas is extracted off of 2 tons of tires, it’s a lot. It’s enough to power a 350 kW generator, which is a lot of power. It seems like it’s all going to work. Right now, we have a unit that works, it runs the generator, and it’s two platforms. The one that we built, like four years ago, I think it was delivered. We’ve spent the last four years fixing it, like any new invention. You run it, it breaks. We’d run it for two hours, it’d break. You know, we need to switch from using a belt to a screw conveyor. We need to change motors out, use heavier duty motors. Learning. Oh, yeah. It was a continual engineering improvement for three years.

**Craig:** So, where are you at right now? What you’re making product for?

**Chris:** Right now, our prototype works. We run it every day. We spent the last year going to engineering companies saying can you build this for us? Can you scale it? We’ve gone through about eight engineering companies before we finally settled on ATS. A lot of them came in and said oh yeah we could do this no problem. Then they spent a week or two watching it run and they’re like yeah we can’t do this. So, we signed a contract with ATS. They’re a worldwide company, publicly traded, $4 billion, and they have 65 plants around the world.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Chris:** They have 6,500 engineers on staff.

**Craig:** They liked what they saw.

**Chris:** Oh, yeah. They spent a month studying it and said, “We can do this, but we want to build a new prototype first because what you have works and it gets us all the scientific data we need, but we want to make sure before we put these in the field, you know, before we build a hundred of them, we want to run one for sure that we’ve built and designed.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**Chris:** So, we agreed to that. We just signed a contract with them. They’re going to build the prototype and 20 units next year. So, the guarantee is to deliver a prototype and 20 units in the field by the end of 2017.

**Craig:** Are you looking for any test subjects? Anybody that you’d like to place one of the machines with?

**Chris:** Yes, absolutely. We haven’t found anybody yet only because we haven’t looked. We have spent the last seven years focused on engineering. We’ve gotten down rabbit trails before of what if we did plastics, what if we did this. The problem is that those take away from production and you know a certain point like after six months of not getting anything done it’s like okay we have to stop this.

**Craig:** Well, I’m very interested. We could definitely be a part of a little more niche in Idaho. We’re in eastern Oregon, the whole lower belt of Idaho, and some of Wyoming.

**Chris:** Wow, that’s a couple million tires, but it’s not really a giant business like Liberty Tire and Ecor where we can move and be nimble, communicate with you, give you a work site, things like that. That’s something I’d absolutely be interested in getting involved in someday.

**Craig:** That would be great. And, you know, because you’re covering such a big geography, being able to move it every four months,

**Chris:** Yeah, I think we can do about a couple million tires a year with one unit. You could easily clean the whole area up with one unit, which would be exciting.

**Craig:** That is great.

**Chris:** And make money. Hopefully, you’d make three to four million off of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I guess that would be the other thing is you’d have to find the outlets for the carbon black and oil.

**Chris:** Yes, over the last three months we’ve been learning about RCD, N990, N550. We had to buy some new test equipment. We were able to get our ash down below 10%. We want to get it down to about 7%. Our goal is to be at N550. The oil is much easier to get rid of. Most of the oil refiners will just streamline it into their oil and pay you whatever the price of crude is. I have heard people tell me that there are valuable esters in there that they could use if we could refine it. The recycled carbon black and the oil on its own are valuable enough to help the machine pay for itself within a couple of years.

**Craig:** And it’s not drawing any power because of the gas it generates.

**Chris:** Exactly. The goal wasn’t even to pay for the electricity as much as not needing the infrastructure in the field. Most of the tires I’ve seen, they’re in the middle of nowhere. They’re not next to a big three-phase line.

**Craig:** Great point.

**Chris:** They’re in a field. It’s about how you get energy out here to process this.

**Craig:** That could be very successful, Chris. That’s exciting technology. And if also one of the obstacles to recycling tires is all the zoning and the codes. You know, you have to build a building, you have to get building permits. And the other problem is who wants a tire factory in their backyard?

**Chris:** Yes.

**Craig:** If you put in for a permit to build a tire factory in Denver, everybody’s going to reject it. So what we’re hoping is, you know, being mobile, there’ll be some permits that you would need like from the EPA.

**Chris:** There’ll be air quality, little things you have to go through,

**Craig:** But no building permits. And it’s not a permanent foundation. We can roll in, clean them up,

**Chris:** Roll out to the next one, deploy it somewhere else, or if you have a giant site, deploy 20 units there. To me, it was the best way to handle the problem. Now we just have to scale.

**Craig:** What’s the future? I mean, in business and entrepreneurship, you kind of have to be optimistic.

**Chris:** The next step is we’re taking pre-orders now based on ATS’s guarantee to deliver the units next year. I’m studying and learning here about the grinding process, what it takes to have the rubber from the tire put down to quarter inch shreds. You know, how much does that equipment cost? Can it be made mobile?

I would really like to see the mobile application finished. The tire shredding I’ve seen so far is 100 feet long. Can we get one of those that’s mobile and fits on a semi-truck bed so the whole thing can be made mobile? That’s what we’re trying to figure out. We got work to do. We don’t get bored.

**Craig:** Well, I’m sure. Is there anything we missed?

**Chris:** If you got any questions for me, just let me know.

**Craig:** What’s the best way they can reach you?

**Chris:** You can get a hold of me at chrisgilladynamics.com. Our website is gileadynamics.com. It’s spelled G-I-L-E-A-D dynamics.com.

**Craig:** Awesome. Well, it’s great to have guys like Chris on here. That’s what this podcast is all about, just getting people a platform that they can share about their new technologies. And Chris, thanks for coming on, man.

**Chris:** Thank you again for having me.

**Craig:** Best of luck to you.

**Chris:** Thank you. Same to you.

**Craig:** All right. Thank you.