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Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Green Rubber Global to Open State-Of-The-Art Recycling Business in State
By Andrew Webb
Copyright © 2007 Albuquerque Journal; Journal Staff Writer
A Malaysian company, with actor Mel Gibson as one of its backers, plans to invest $30 million in a first-of-its-kind tire recycling plant in New Mexico.
Green Rubber Global— which says it has invented the world's first commercially viable, waste-free method for recycling tires— intends to locate its headquarters in Albuquerque and its first recycling plant in Gallup.
The company expects to employ up to 150 people once it gets its New Mexico facilities up and running by mid-2008, and then build more plants in the United States, Mexico and Asia.
Rick Homans, who recently announced plans to return to the private sector after five years in state government, will be president of Green Rubber Global and will be responsible for its expansion in the Americas. Green Rubber Global is a subsidiary of Kuala Lampur, Malaysia-based Petra Group.
Gibson was in New Mexico with company officials this week.
Besides Green Rubber Global, Gibson said he has stakes in several rain forest protection efforts in Central and South America.
"I've been into this stuff for a long time," he said. "Usually I'm just there to provide comic relief."
He added that the tire recycling technology intrigued him because as domestic landfills increasingly reject tire waste, it is shipped to other countries, often poor countries, that are willing to take it in exchange for money.
"We're making landfills in other peoples' backyards," he said.
About 1 billion waste tires are produced worldwide each year, nearly 300 million of them in the U.S. Most are simply put in landfills or burned, but those practices have come under increasing scrutiny by environmentalists.
"This is the world's greatest environmental concern," said Vinod Sekhar, founder and president of Petra Group, adding that the annual tire waste includes 1.5 billion gallons of precious fossil fuel.
Sekhar, Gibson and Homans, who sat down for an interview with the Journal on Tuesday, are expected to join Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, Economic Development Cabinet Secretary Fred Mondragon, Gallup Mayor Harry Mendoza and other state and local officials to formally announce the plans today in Albuquerque.
"We would like this to be the showpiece center for all of our operations, and a model for our other plants," Sekhar said of the Gallup plant.
Sekhar said he first visited New Mexico and Gov. Bill Richardson at the urging of Eclipse Aviation CEO Vern Raburn, whom he met at an annual Forbes CEO conference in Singapore. He said he was impressed by the state's efforts to position itself as a leader in "green" technology.
In the wake of that visit, the Economic Development Department, the city of Gallup and other agencies began attempts to recruit the company.
"I was very happy to see that the perception measured up to the reality," Sekhar said.
Gibson, whose film company, Icon Productions, recently shot "Seraphim Falls" in New Mexico, said he met and befriended Sekhar through a business associate.
Homans said that Green Rubber Global has reached an agreement with Gallup under which the city will build a recycling plant on city-owned property just east of town, and lease it back to the company over 10 years.
A location for the Albuquerque headquarters has not been determined.
He said the company was drawn to Gallup by local incentives and the availability of employees. The nearby Pittsburgh & Midway coal mine is slated to close next year, at a cost of 300 jobs.
Green Rubber plans to pay about $15 an hour, and company officials say it could attract to the area companies seeking to use the Green Rubber compound.
The plant will use Petra Group's DeLink— a patented chemical process the company says can devulcanize old tires and turn them into usable rubber that actually costs less than new, or "virgin" rubber.
Vulcanization is a process developed by Charles Goodyear in the mid-19th century to link rubber molecules into larger particles, thereby making the rubber more impervious to weather. Because it is difficult to break those links, recycling of waste tires has been limited to shredding or crumbling the rubber into a low-quality compound used in products like floor mats or truck tire retread.
The rubber created by the DeLink process can be revulcanized and used to make a full range of rubber products, including tires, shoe soles, automotive components such as weather strips and hoses, and consumer products such as swim fins, grips and rubber bands.
Several other methods for devulcanization are under development. But Sekhar said DeLink is the first that is commercially viable.
The DeLink process, created by Sekhar's father, B.C. Sekhar, creates no waste or emissions, Sekhar said. B.C. Sekhar was a chemist who led several rubber research institutes as Malaysia became one of the world's largest rubber producers. He died in September.
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