all right here we are again another episode of talking tires I’m your host Craig hunter from Tire reclaim and I brought a very special guest with me today I’m super excited actually we we brought ourselves to him Lavon deweer from inch so we’re here visiting with leavon because he is a crumb rubber manufacturing facility welcome to talk and tires the podcast that delves deep into the world of tires join us as we explore everything from the science behind the manufacturing to the latest innovation into 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 the 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 as you know as a listener of talking tires everything we can learn more about the industry we do a little bit better to make the industry stronger in

the recycling or manufacturing whatever makes it easier for people to get tires own tires and dispose of tires properly so leavon I I noticed that the company um started in 1991 was that originally your that was actually the Machinery building side I think was 1990 or 19 91 we bought that side of the business in uh 2007 okay uh entech actually started as a tire recycling company before we got into Machinery before we had the Machinery division uh in 200 I’m sorry 1995 okay uh is when the name entech was incorporated oh so that’s that’s great 1995 okay so 1995 and Lamar at joar was already making machines yes I met Lamar probably in my first week in business because I needed some machinery and uh somebody that knew their company that that knew they had just gotten started a few years before and were looking for work uh told me about them and uh so I looked Lamar up and we’ve been working closely together ever since then so it’s been a great relationship so at that time were you collecting tires did you have a collection service going to tire shops and

the whole business yes how did that yes we we started out collecting tires how did that so real quick how did that start about where did you come from a tire company or industry and then uh no need uh kind of the way everybody gets into this industry by accident um I started out as a chemist in a a firste automotive supplier in Northern Indiana and we were supplying uh Honda uh Toyota Ford with weather stripping and got on a a a recycling task force this would have been early 90s when factories were starting to talk about keeping stuff out of the landfills and really had a good time with that spent about four years there and along with another uh friend from that company uh went out and started uh a tire recycling company uh we we kind of had done some investigation and found that uh Industrial Rubber recycling would be kind of a challenge because to get a large amount of of a certain type of material to one location just because of the way that industry set up would be challenging hard to scale uh tires on the other hand

were still uh tire recycling was still in its infancy at that point and so we decided to go with that and you can see them everywhere you could see them everywhere very visible at that point there were still lots of piles all over the country um that was very common to have Tire fires they were on the news all the time uh back in those days and uh so that that’s all I got into it so we’re still seeing some of that in the west we see a lot of junk Tire piles guys that go and collect fees to pick up tires but then end up putting him somewhere that nobody even knew about where did he go and now we have you know some cleanup efforts and things like that so again I still want to be back in that time frame so you’re what would you say you’re driving force in that scenario was were you trying to fix a need that you saw were you trying to and it’s okay enrich yourself maybe you saw an opportunity there yeah um probably what the way a lot of companies get started you

know you want to you want to have your own company you want to do your own thing and I I think that was probably a lot of the motivating force I like the idea of being in a recycling uh type of work uh that that felt good you know you know to do something like that why do you think that is um don’t know I I I think uh generally uh recycling is looked at as a necessary uh thing that we’re going to have to do better as a society uh going forward and um maybe that’s it I don’t know yeah it it’s generally viewed in a positive light I think um unlike some some Industries have the the Mis forun of being you know viewed negatively um and I think in general recycling is is viewed positively although no one wants to have one next to their house you know that that’s a yeah that’s common well I think a big move for for us you know in recycling when you talk about that and what we as a society are doing is the blue cans and I don’t know if you guys

have those here but in Idaho we have a recycling can that’s blue and then we have our gray or green can that’s for the landfill for waste and and we pay for that service so we pay an additional to our garbage bill to have this bin there to recycle so people being a seeing that there’s a a benefit to recycling so much so that they’ll do it with their pocketbook it’s a big leap I think in recycling and just the overall mindset of recycling things so having said that when someone that I’m working with and they’re you know maybe we’re making tire rubber or crumb rubber or things like that and and we’re handling their service and they’re talking about pricing and they immediately go to well if you start recycling this then you’re going to be able to lower my price right and you know that’s a dangerous conversation obviously and we have that conversation about tires and tire recycling but I think about that there is something in our being that you can look at something and go you know repurposing or reusing or recycling this is better than just throwing it

in the trash or wasting it and I think that’s been a mindset that’s been growing and getting stronger and stronger so I don’t want to get off the topic too far so then I’d say let’s flash to what you say 2007 that you when you did the pur Machinery yeah yeah um as early in our uh history we we kind of started there wasn’t a lot of Machinery out there designed for this I mean there were some manufacturers but again it was a very new industry and generally in any industry it takes years decades even to develop the Machinery to do whatever it is you’re trying to do very well and so the industry was just getting started we saw a lot of Need for uh improvements to the machinery and so we started tinkering with this and changing that and and you liked Lamar you worked well and his brothers and his dad um were were great to work with and uh so they kind of would would open up their shop and and uh do whatever we needed even even gave me access to it on the on the weekends to to

tanker around or fix something that have broken and you as well and and Lamar everybody’s been very open to us which I thank you for that by um you know joar just so you know that’s where we’re buying our Chrome rubber facility is through joar M manufacturing which Leon owns as well as we’re talking about um but I just want to mention that they’ve been very open to yeah come down remember we came in January walked around Tom Parker’s machinery and saw some of that kind of getting us getting our gears going you know and then now and we said we’ll be back to CRS and here we are we came to visit our own Machinery in the shop and just watching that so but the Innovation continues I’ve noticed so in the tour today we got to see some really cool fire suppression sensors and things like that that I think you know a real tale to how much you guys are pushing to advance the cause if you will to advance from rubber making and oh here’s a problem let’s jump on that you know I I don’t think you see that

from some of the larger manufacturers in the world it’s to be be able to jump on something like that yeah I think it’s uh kind of a key uh benefit I think we have a key strength that we have is that you know we’re we’re running the Machinery day in and day out you know 24 hours a day 7 days a week finding out what breaks what isn’t working well what’s hard to maintain um and and then we have immediate feedback you know to the manufacturing facility where they can quickly that today yeah he mentioned that he says you know it’s it makes it a lot easier for us to try new things and to you know test Market as well as um get feedback when it’s just right up the road and my boss owns the plan is what he said so that’s kind of lines up so they they’ll come up with a new design you know the engineers down there will come up with the new design bring it up here I think you know that thing you’re talking about was just installed for the first time yesterday um the newest

version will run that through the weekend by Monday they’ll have feedback you know this needs to be changed hey this is working great great job guys fantastic that kind of stuff great typically doesn’t happen that that feedback loop uh the the the number of iterations that you can do in a in a short period of time is greatly increased when you have that kind of a feedback loop and so uh advance can take place more quickly and so that’s that’s what I won’t want to don’t want to say it was an accident but we we probably never realized the the benefits um you know those of us me and my partners from the early days didn’t we knew that uh building that relationship with jar was going to be valuable we didn’t quite comprehend how valuable that would be oh that’s interesting that you know that the the person building the equipment is probably the foundation I would say to the the business being able to perform and those guys seem to be if not perfect I mean really close to Perfection I mean your shop floors spotless everything itemized everything in its right

spot and when we come as a visit that’s a huge impact on us I mean we’re spending money we want to make sure that we’re spending it with the right companies when we show up at your facility it’s like a Hos hospital room floor in there you know and that’s and Robotics and you know just all these different things that you’re doing to to Really innovate and we like to be a part of that kind of thing well I appreciate all that um yeah we drive real hard we got a lot of lot of people down there that love machinery and love love building stuff and and uh yeah so there some great successes any struggles through those years obviously there was some tough times I think nothing struggles seems like yeah um maybe so many struggles that none of them stand out right uh how about early on how about ini early on I mean it was a week to week literally week toe survival thing um there weren’t markets developed for the end products yet um is that are you calling those oh yeah back then it was you know I had

uh uh in those days three or four partners and some were you know at work every day others had other jobs and they were just was supporting us um you know a lot of times there wasn’t money for for a paycheck I mean much of those uh many of those first uh few years uh yeah there was there was not enough money to go around so you always tried to pay your you know your electric bill and your payroll first and and usually there wasn’t enough left to to cover everybody um but yeah you uh myself and and my partners in the early days uh we so some Financial struggles some Financial strg outbound product struggles yeah uh just just the fact that you know you you You’ get a market going and and then it would collapse you know overnight and then you’d have to quickly scramble to find somewhere else to go with your with your stuff or back then there were uh a lot more unscrupulous uh uh players in the industry than there are today um it was kind of a generally accepted thing that you know that that you

were competing against a lot of U unsavory characters out there and and I think anyone in the industry in those early days that still is here um would would say that same thing so yeah there were those kind of struggles um and then the the the larger uh uh macroeconomic struggles uh you know the the period from you know 2008 to 2011 was a very difficult time for us uh because of the region we’re in as a large were you already in this building at that time uh no we were still at our other facility in Michigan at that time we didn’t move here to this facility till 2012 this facility uh incidentally became available because of the economic downturn uh this as I was uh saying this was is a large manufactured housing and RV uh Center uh for the for North America and so that’s you know uh uh typically kind of an up and down kind of uh industry yeah there’s a lot of them parked out here right now yeah although although you know recently it’s it’s become less so but but back in those days it was very very

much you know you you’d have a downturn every few years and that that economic uh crisis of of you know 8 9 10 that that period hit the RV industry very very hard and and very suddenly um and uh so that that made this building available and so we were able to get this now you mean this one literally we’re in now or the one next to the big this whole property 40 acres and at that time it had 160,000 Square feers so that all became available as a result of that downturn so you know there was a silver lining I guess way out right there which one was it um so we were able to to move here in in 2012 and that has been a really big thing for us gave us more space to operate and uh we quickly filled it up and I’ll need more space um but um so that was a difficult time uh we we barely survived that that period um because you know it it probably at its core was a was a banking crisis what kind of products were you making at that time

is tdf um at that time so we had just purchased jar and we trying to uh shift their business focus from what they were doing which was more of a job shop kind of doing odds and ends a large a large part of their work was for the RV industry you know building hauling trailers and things like that um and we were shifting them to be being more of a heavy machinery manufacturer so we still weren’t at the place where they were making money at and so you our our bank wanted us to to stop doing that you know and we saw that as crucial to our future um so we didn’t want to stop building machinery and so that’s that future think and you were talking to Brett and I about earlier it’s like this is a three-year plan it’s probably not the best for to get into but think in 10 and 20 years would have been the case with that purchase as well you weren’t going to see a great return you don’t learn to do that kind of stuff in three years well I love guys that give advice

that they’ve already lived or that they would do themselves I no that for sure um had we had a a three to five year mindset we never would have made that purchase we never would have done many of the things that we’ve done over the past uh you know almost three decades that we’ve been in this now um you know another thing we were doing at the time for about a decade from the late 90s to the maybe 2008 n something like that we were doing uh cleanups that was the first thing we ever did that we actually made money at you know up until then we barely made enough money to you know Tire CLS like we about earlier as we talk they were the tiles were all over the country state funded by chance they were they were pretty much all state funed and and that was out of necessity because no person whose property ended up with a tire pile on it had the money to clean up that it seems to be that way taken over yeah no so was that a tax or do you remember or um in

in our region um it it was done state by state but they all seemed to do it at around the same time um in our region there was a tax put in place I think it was in the early ’90s maybe mid ’90s so that they could staff a regulatory Force to go around and say you know you you can’t do this with tires you can’t just take them and make a Giant Mountain out of these tires that’s illegal um you got to stop doing that so that was kind of the beginning of the industry really and and then many states also said you can’t put a whole tire in a landfill because up up to that point it was actually possible to put a whole tire in landfill in in most States and um that’s kind of what created the industry is saying you know you can’t just pile them up in a field you can’t just throw them whole into a landfill you at least have to chop them up into a certain size so that’s where we’re at in Idaho right now is they made illegal and I’m seeing 90s early

mid 90s on a lot of laws read across the countries that seems like people were very active about the time it started 91 to 96 is a lot of the dates that I see in Idaho we’re landfilling 65 5% reduction of the whole tire that’s on the books right now we’re talking to the state now to start working on some cleanup monies um I think it’s a a dollar a150 per tire is that how they’ve done it in Michigan Illinois is I can’t say the amount but it’s it’s enough that they can um you know Michigan has been very proactive and and they’ve been really great to work with we we’ve got a long uh relationship uh working with them it started through the that’s where we started you know we’re we’re uh half a mile south of the state line U we started about 2 miles north of the state line in Michigan and um so so early on that’s as I was starting to say we some of the first times that we actually started to see wow this is what it’s like for a company to actually make a profit this

is kind of neat you know oh right um because prior to that you know it was just survival literally just surviving week to week and and hoping we had enough money to fix our Shredder or eat or whatever um Michigan was the first place where we started to do the cleanups and Most states had many millions of tires piled up in various piles around the different states that was kind of the norm I think we still have that in the Northwest I really do and uh so this this started to happen in the maybe 95 to 97 kind of in that range at first we just you know we would go out bid you know at the state level to to clean up this pile so many dollars per per ton typically or sometimes it was per T you Fielding those calls or did you have somewhere to go and find out where the cleanup sites were to be um CU they had the regat world it’s a pretty small world so you just you just knew about that you had yeah it was pretty well publicized but there were only ever you know

five players in any any given State you know that was doing this kind of work um so so we would bid you know some sometimes get the bids sometimes not when we did you know we would send a trailer out I mean I remember at times we loaded them by hand you know we’d wait out into that pile of tires and pick them up you know full of water and who knows what else and and load up the tires uh as time went on we were able to get you know skid loaders and loaders and excavators and open top trailers and various things as as we started to get more bids and we we kept you know we’d always try to do a really good job so that we to have a good reputation and and win more jobs that way um we started to think wow you know if we we started to get farther away from our plant you know became we were eating up all of our earnings or Revenue in transportation costs and so we started thinking you know all you were doing with those tires anyway was shredding them

and Hauling them to a landfill because they’re all dirty and right and oxidized or really and back then there wouldn’t have been anything to do with them anyway um so we thought why don’t we shred and go to the nearest landfill right on site you know to do that we’d have to build a where my head went Shredder yeah and so sitting out there on a on an excavator you start thinking man if I didn’t have to haul this load six hours south shred it and then haul it to a landfill down with all that air space yeah yeah we we would actually have a much better profit or we could bid lower and and get more um more of the jobs so we with jar you know we we decided we could we can build we can take our Shredder you know a little we had a barklay at the time we we could take that barklay we can mount it on a what if we got an old John Deere 790 you know excavator and rip the top off and use the dies move the diesel engine back in the back and

hook a hydraulic pump to it you know we could we could have building P one of our shredders that we have the T because we have the T of portable we have two of those so yeah you were building a makeshift one of those in the 9s we built one for you know just four tires and so we we had maybe four or five iterations of that and you know cut to the End by by 200 uh nine I think we were we had three cleanups going at the same time this is in the you know the the financial crisis so we had a lot going on the biggest I think we had three of the biggest cleanups that we’ ever done going on all at the same time one in Washington state one in Michigan and one in in uh New York and uh that’s when the financial crisis really hit um I think it was actually more like 8 2008 and uh that’s what caught us in a in a really bad spot you know we had more money borrowed than we had ever had spr out we had a lot of

receivables which we didn’t have cash to cover you know our bank got jittery because of the the general condition of the economy in this region because of the RV industry crashing so bad and so that was one of probably you getting lumped into that geographically we got lumped into that just because we’re we’re here in this spot and you know in general this was a bad if you were a bank this was a bad place to be yeah they’d see the address and go uhoh mid literally they they said let’s let’s let’s get out of that region some of them did you know the ones that are based here which was a lesson for us um can’t leave you know so they’re going to stick it out and and they know you better any the ones that are here from far away that have their head off as far away they could just leave if they want to so we learned a little bit about banking through that time and we did survive I mean that’s that’s the key we survived we made it uh we got smarter through that whole process um so

uh that was tough but we made it there’s been a few others um like that uh probably none brought us quite as close to to the end as that one did um but we feel like every time we survive one of those tough times um we come out stronger on the other side we’ve learned something know a little bit better about you what to what to avoid in the future yeah so as you saw the cleanup project starting to dwindle do you feel like Now’s the Time to start ramping up crown and things also Perfect Storm also in that time you know we we were in the middle of the three largest cleanups that we’d ever done but we also knew that that stuff was going to Sunset and there really weren’t very many more big jobs out there and we were going to have to transition we had just bought jar two years earlier they still weren’t uh making money and we’re still trying to find our our Niche there with with jar um and and so that was that was a tough time uh we started getting into chome rubber but we

still didn’t really know what we were doing and that industry was still kind of in its infancy um and so all that was happening at the same time that would have been tough enough if it weren’t you know even if we hadn’t had a financial National financial crisis worldwide financial crisis but um again we we made it we survived um you really learn what you’re capable of uh in tough times and um don’t like to say it’s good to have those times but but truly it is I mean it really helps to um yeah cuz the decade after that it’s it’s a good motivator you know it’s a really good motivator and and we forget far too quickly um what got us into that kind of a situation and we have to be reminded about every 5 to 10 years yeah there’s there’s a quote in there I’m not going to remember but Jack Welch talk the former CEO of GE and something about being hungry I’m not going to quote it because I’ll screw it up but yeah there’s something about having that hunger and not forgetting that hunger there’s no motivator like

a like a crisis so yeah it’s uh so now the Sunny Side though I like to hear the the the story The Comeback so now you’re coming out of that those are dwindling you’re seeing crumb come up you’re like wait a minute there might be something here the steel recycling that’s a whole another part that a lot of people don’t understand right um so that was around the time that we we started seeing you know the the need to do a better job of separating the steel and the rubber um at that time still a lot of people landfilling their their steel that was just a byproduct so that and if you’re doing car tires there’s all this fluff you know easily half of the tire was still going to the landfill even though you’re putting a lot of money into chopping it up pretty small so uh the steel seemed to be kind of a no-brainer if you could get that cleaner um there were some people that were taking it they just needed cleaner material and so we worked uh pretty hard to and when you say cleaner so we liberate

that steel and there’s still little honks of rubber that get through the Machinery so when you’re trying to sell that to a steel meal it didn’t look appetizing to them back then most didn’t want that there are a few out there now that for their reasons they have they don’t mind you know plenty of rubber contamination on that steel most places would prefer to have as little rubber on their as possible simply because they’re not buying rubber they want to buy steel um but are some people that that don’t mind it on there um but back at the time this was not a very widely accepted raw material for the steel or Foundry industry um much much different than today there’s still many that don’t use it but there are many that that do today um but back then there wasn’t really very good equipment uh to clean up the SE so were you burying steel at that time 12 I guess is that where we’re at 12 um we didn’t landfill a lot of it um because we were able to get to the point where it was clean enough and we were

lucky to be kind of in the region we at which is very very strong in steel and and iron right um so we were able to find since we have so many choices we were able to find some that would take it but we had times where the value went down to nearly nothing um and so again we saw that as a as a need and so um then kils you had tdf coming off going at that time yeah that that was still our biggest use for the for the raw material but for the for the rubber portion coming off of our tires um for many many years that was the main thing that we did it never paid very well by the time we got done paying the trucking um but it always was a better Outlet sometimes feels like you’re taking pocket money out of one pocket put in the other right exactly um but you know it has been a a a very necessary part of the growth of the tire recycling industry over the last 30 years I don’t think anyone thought that was the ultimate use of a tire

you know somewhere down the road we figured there would be better uses for it than simply getting the the btu value out of it um but it’ll it’ll be a necessary part of the industry there’s a word just popped in my head that I never heard you use it’s uh paralysis what is it about that industry that’s had such a hard time in the tire recycling you know I really can’t speak knowledgeably about that um you know I I watch from the outside and I’ve seen an awful lot of money spent on it um you know maybe the new the the technology that’s going to be profitable is right around the corner maybe it’s already here maybe somebody’s using it um I don’t think there’s anything else any other part of the industry where more money has been spent over the last couple decades right that’s yeah kind of what I but I really can’t I really can’t speak knowledge I just don’t know much about it we’re trying to learn more we’re trying to keep an eye on it because we’re we’re a big enough player in the industry now that we need

to be aware of you know what’s happening out there but um I hope it I hope somebody makes a breakthrough at some point great right yeah I mean Europe I was just I’m just back from a couple conferences there uh the confence uh there there was one in Brussels and then actually one coming up uh more related to recycled carbon black in Spain in a couple months which you know we’ll have representatives there um my my business partner is actually going to go to that uh I think it’s about six weeks from now so we’re we’re trying we’re making an effort to stay you know to to know the the people that are working in that area there’s an awful lot of money being spent in Europe right now on that um that that seems to be for for for whatever reason I can’t I can’t say but that seems to be their focus um but I’ve heard Canada did it much better than Europe as far as subsidizing tire recycling and kind of helping getting that launched again I I know maybe enough to be to be dangerous you know good on you

for not speaking on stuff that we we are very close to Ontario so I know a little bit about what happened there they were heavily heavily subsidized ing the industry you know if you go back 10 15 years um and at that time we were getting into crumb Rubber and I didn’t like the heavy subsidies because it allowed them to make crumb Rubber and ship it right into our backyard and sell it cheaper than what we could what ended up happening which doesn’t always happen when government throws a lot of money at something but in that case uh there’s two or no three uh three or more really good manufacturers of end products that are that are in Ontario that I don’t know you’d have to ask them they maybe wouldn’t have be in the spot today uh making these great products if it hadn’t been for the that that Push by the government so sometimes that works sometimes it doesn’t well a lot of things when I read on most recycling it seems like it really get started in Europe and then the technology start kind of or at least the mindset start

maybe Australia you see a lot of stuff going on in Australia that way and then and then America starts you know letting them I think it’s just yeah I think that happens with some products I mean other other things happen you know they start right here in North America there there’s a lot of innovation still happening here you know hear people complaining about the the younger Generations not being as hard of workers I still see an awful lot of really hardworking uh young people um but really what it comes down to is there there’s always been those people that that dive in and and get dirty and and really innovate and and uh and we’ll we’ll see more in future Generations I’m sure um you know you talked about we where’re governments get involved in trying to drive technology California maybe gets a bad rap sometimes for throwing a lot of money at stuff I can again only speak to what I know about and and that is in in uh the case of rubberized asphalt which which I’m a a strong believer in and we’re trying to do a lot of work here

in this region it’s a slow process in their case because the government did a lot of research believed in it got behind it and actually made laws to drive it forward now I think you know I I have not done a careful study on this I don’t think I’m mistaken in saying that they’re probably do doing more with rubberized asphalt in California than the rest of the world combined I mean I would not be afraid to make that state and you have to be a member of Cal recycled to utilize that that’s something I didn’t know yeah it’s a smart way to do it they’ve done an awful lot um for that technology it it’s growing in other parts of the country you know Arizona’s was a Pioneer um Texas is doing an awful lot of work and some other states um but it’s it’s very slowo if the government doesn’t push it forward and so while that’s not always in my belief the right way to go it really worked in this case and in the C you know uh Ontario like I said has some success stories as well with that approach

well did you hear that Idaho you might need a little help to get some of these things going maybe you know if the free market can do it I’m always a supporter of that sometimes that just takes too long and sometimes the risks are too great and not enough innovators will jump in and try it without a little bit of a push from the government so I think you know both both ways work um it it just depends on the situation which way is going to work best I think the hard part with the government is knowing when to back away and say then let the free market take over that’s what’s always and or building a system to do that you know right right and you mentioned that Michigan was trying to develop a its own department or or whatnot that’s one thing that I think if you could utilize other departments and not grow government with the program necessarily just you know maybe the DEQ just has a way to regulate the money or something so that way you’re not adding offices and people and things but just adding the ability to

get some of these projects paid for yeah it’s probably different in every state in Michigan this was part of the solid waste uh division of what is now called eagle I think it’s Energy Great Lakes and environment or something like that um and like I said they uh whatever they’re doing in Michigan they’re doing right because they’ve kept the same staff uh in place for years you know you have not a lot of turnover and and therefore the people really get to know the industry and they can make more sensible decisions unlike we see in other states uh which I won’t mention but um you you just don’t see that in every the thing for you because you have States just a few miles apart so you got Michigan’s doing things right and maybe some of really close neighbors are not right and and through our uh you know we’re not a we don’t have a lot of locations but when we were doing the cleanups for that decade decade and a half we worked in States from coast to coast and we saw the different way that different departments worked in all those

different states and uh we certainly saw a big difference in in in how they function and we always were happy that we were located uh in Michigan because they were doing such a good job of managing it nothing’s ever perfect you know we’re not perfect they’re not perfect but I I feel like we we’ve we’ve had a pretty good relationship um and uh yeah I think they they’ve done just enough to to keep a Level Playing Field make sure people are following the rules and rules are necessary um but then just kind of you know apply gentle pressure you know uh they they’ve had some some uh grants available which they’re heavily trying to push into uh re uh rubberized asphalt um applications now because they see that as being uh in my in my view you know if if if any state what states could do is really push that because that’s not showing real like favoritism to uh some other widget you know that somebody’s building out a tire of recycled tires because what is it that fixes all the roads in every state and every municipality across North America it’s tax

money so why not use their tax money as an incentive it’s it’s tax money that’s going to pay for that road anyway use that same tax money to incentivize the use of race recycled produ it may start as research and development you’re spend money the beginning that’s how it starts and um really in that area there’s enough research and development that has happened there’s really not a need for a lot more of that it’ be more how to Tool your St just getting people to start trying it so they got to incentivize contractors or counties or whatever to to try this really great product and you know everything requires somebody to change what they’re doing and change Machinery or whatever and that’s kind of the hurdle that we have to get over now it’s not a question of is this stuff usable in roads it’s it’s one of the best uses for this we’re that yeah we’re way past that there’s been so many years of research um in fact a conference I was at last spring that that that came up it was a rubberized asphalt conference in in southern Spain mostly European

uh people there but there were a lot of you know Asian and and North American U people there as well and people were kind of lamenting the fact that you know how many years have we’ve been coming to these conferences and we’re still talking about research we all know we don’t need more research it’s it’s proven Beyond any Shadow of Doubt that it works fantastically it’s just that we have to get contractors you know how how do you get over that hurdle of getting counties or or or States it’s cost benefit right yeah yeah and but there’s all kinds of challenges that we probably don’t have enough time to that’s a podcast all itself but um you’re okay you’re on okay we’ll do it sometime um but but there’s just challenges you know there might be somebody at a state DOT for example that came out of some University where they did that for a dissertation and they really want to push this um so they get they get a test done they get some money allocated and they incentivize you know some 50 miles a road or whatever well it takes you know

3 four five years before you really know how this road performed might take two or three years to actually get it down well by that time this person has moved on to another state the person coming after them don’t really they may or may not be interested in that technology and now it falls apart and so that’s that’s the challenge and that’s where I think maybe California recognized that if they didn’t want this to take 40 years they had to actually this was one of the areas where they’re going to have to actually make laws pushing it forward you know they believed in it there was plenty PL research um and and and they just decided they’d have to push it again I’m not advocating for that in every state I think they were kind of the pioneer we can we can population wise you know they have a lot of tires like they had to do something I would think right right they would be in this bad situation so I think in their case in my opinion that that was a good move I don’t necessarily uh believe that every state has

to do that I I think we can take their example learn a lot from it right and just apply that technology in other states and again like I said it’s not only California there’s there’s other ones that are doing a really great job I feel good about the progress we’ve made in Michigan um and we’ve done a little bit in Indiana um and and I know there’s a lot of stuff happening in Illinois um some other states really you’re touching Idaho too because through you know learning more from you guys and going out and doing what we’re going to do we’re the state house we’re having the conversations now hir to lobbies to kind of figure out you know which way to go to kind of get some of these things set up so you’re doing it you know more just in your area yeah and that’s I think the goal there’s a lot of areas where you’re you know in your business where you’re maybe a little more secretive about what you’re doing I think when it when it comes to tire recycling and rubber in Asphalt there’s no reason for anyone to

be secretive we can be wide open and share information it’s only going to benefit the taxpayers and people driving the roads of North America and the tire recyclers it’s going to benefit everybody I hate the term no-brainer just because you’re implying that someone doesn’t have a brain If they don’t like your idea this one really feels like a no-brainer to me I mean you’re putting the tires that are running on that road right back on the road you know it it just seems like it comes together really well okay well I don’t that’s why we’re so so strong on this um we we’re doing a lot of other stuff there’s a lot of other things that need to happen as well simultaneously but this is one area where I I think we can all come together and just agree look the time for research is over I mean of course more research is great but we’re past that we’re ready the research should be on how do we tool this how do we how do we how do we scale it up yep yep okay well I didn’t want to take too

much of your time I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and I know it’s not easy to talk about yourself and your your wife will probably be jealous how much you talk to me when you get home you just she might I have to we’ll have to go on a date tonight that’s great all right well thank you very much and uh we’ll see you on the next podcast you’ve already committed to that right I guess I did all right thank you thank you