TLDR: BDS operates New England’s cleanest tire processing facility using SonicAire fans to manage highly combustible textile dust (16,000 BTU). The system replaced dangerous 3-4 hour manual cleanings at 29-foot heights with 24/7 automated dust control, while also blending air to reduce extreme temperatures (up to 150°F in summer).
Key Points:
• Only two permitted tire processing facilities in New England
• Textile dust burns at 16,000 BTUs – highly combustible
• Replaced 3-4 hour manual cleanings at 29-foot heights
• Fans run 24/7, preventing monthly shutdowns
• Dual benefit: dust control plus air blending for temperature management
Transcript:
My name is Tobias Cole, Plant Manager of BDS’s Tire Processing Facility. We own and operate the only two permitted facilities in all of New England. We all take a lot of pride in the facility itself and its maintenance and making sure that the facility not only functions properly but is kept up well.
One of the challenges with a facility like this is making sure that dust mitigation is constant. Along with the regular dirt and dust that comes in with the tire material itself, the primary generator of dust is the textiles inside the tires: nylon, polyester, rayon. When those are liberated, they often are basically suspended in the atmosphere. Those are all petroleum products, so they’re all very combustible. We’ve actually had them tested; they burn at over 16,000 BTUs.
There definitely is a lot of dust generated by tire shredding. Here we take everything from a whole tire all the way down to fine material and extract all the wire out. We do the best we can to try to eliminate the dust, but you still do end up with dust on piping and rails that are exposed to the settling of dust. And that’s where the SonicAire fans have come into play to blow that off at a high level. Our ceilings are 29 feet tall, so we don’t have to have somebody come in once a month and shut the plant down, clean the place out, and try not to let things build up.
There’s certain regulations that we have to abide by that, if the dust is allowed to build up beyond a certain point, that we then have to bring in HEPA filters and vacuums and do much more intensive cleaning. The facility was actually designed in mind of making it a less labor-intensive job. It’s important not only for employee retention, but also just general morale.
Prior to having the SonicAires installed, we basically had to have guys go up in a scissor lift and blow down all the areas with air guns or leaf blowers to keep that dust down. For us to do a total blowdown would probably take a good 3 or 4 hours, where now the fans run constantly 24 hours a day. It’s just rotating and blowing dust off the beams and places we can’t get at from top to bottom.
We clean the facility entirely, top to bottom, probably every two hours. On days like today, it can easily get to be 120° up on the mezzanines. When you’re getting up around 20 or 25 feet above that, they’re probably easily in the 150°, 140° range. So, safety becomes an issue at that point. The SonicAires not only help us keep the dust down, but they actually blend the air for us. So, it helps in the summertime cool the upper areas, and in the wintertime it helps blend some of the warmer air down on the ground level.
With the extra time that we have now that we have the SonicAire fans, we’re able to focus more on other areas of facility maintenance and cleanliness as well. We are able to really focus on the ground levels and the mezzanine areas. Maintenance-wise, the fans themselves have been extremely reliable. It’s a tough environment in there, it really is. There’s a lot of heat, there’s a lot of dust. And the fans, for the most part, have performed flawlessly, really.
I have nothing bad to say about the fans. I would recommend them to anybody that’s in this kind of environment. They keep on going. The only time we will shut them off is if we have to do welding or maintenance that’s close to where it’s going to blow. Because they do put off a lot of air. If we keep evolving, we will actually keep adding more fans.
At every recycling facility, dust mitigation is a serious issue. Not only a safety issue but just a general housekeeping issue. And the fans themselves have been pretty much a solve for us in those hard-to-reach areas, in those high temperature areas. I would definitely recommend SonicAire to other recycling facilities. The one comment we always get is we can’t believe how clean it is, and SonicAire helps us achieve that goal of maintaining a clean facility.
