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Environmental Programs
A pen made from scrap tires? You got it!


Picture of Recycled pen
Scrap tires have been a source of ground rubber since 1992. This resource also is called crumb rubber.

Crumbs are used to make:

  • Ball-point pens, wallets, women’s fashions and other consumer products

  • rubber-modified asphalt, used primarily in California and Arizona

  • new tires

  • picnic tables and other molded products

  • sheets of rubber for flooring and mats

  • soaker hoses and other bound products

  • soil amendments for playgrounds and horse arenas

Another use of scrap tires is Tire-Derived Fuel (TDF), a process where whole tires are burned in facilities such as cement kilns, pulp and paper mills, and industrial and utility boilers.

In the U.S., about 33 million scrap tires per year are processed into crumbs.  A total of 115 million tires per year are burned as TDF. Unfortunately, those numbers are only slightly more than half the 281 million scrap tires generated each year.1

Fast Facts:

  • Average weight of a passenger car scrap tire: 20 pounds

  • Oil (equivalency) in a passenger car tire: 7 gallons

  • Amount of steel in a steel-belted radial passenger car tire: 2.5 pounds

Find out more about tire recycling:

Oklahoma’s Waste Tire Program
Summary of the 2005 Waste Tire Recycling Act - pdf
Waste Tire Fee: Why do I pay it and where does it go? – pdf

The history of tires and tire recycling.

Remember — when you buy recycled,
you help expand the market for recycled material.

According to the Rubber Manufacturers Association.