Happy Monday, Grove!
Today we're recycling tires. In current practice this means grinding, leaching, & burning tires with a good PR team.
Vince Gori has no engineering background or venture funding and is building a machine that freezes tires until they're glass (in a mechanical engineer's sense).
Green Recycling Solutions International separates glass-tires into three sellable materials in a single pass.
Along the way, he teamed up with two people you'll meet below: Dr. Kurosh Darvish, who chairs mechanical engineering at Temple, and Mehrdad Swizi, the PhD student now hurdling the tech towards commercialization.
Let's dive in.
In this week's issue
- Tire(d) Truths
- Generating Credits before Revenue
- Turning Liquid Nitrogen into Second Chances
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Tire(d) Truths
Tires are made of three separate materials: (1) rubber wrapped around (2) steel wire and a (3) layer of fabric cord. Despite each of the material being available for a second life, tires are mostly left in landfills.
Vince’s machine first freezes the tire using liquid nitrogen in the lab to get down to around minus 160 Celsius. Then a jaw crusher fractures it while a mill grinds down what's left.
The steel wire gets melted down, the cord goes into carpet and rugs, and the crumb rubber is either sold as a commodity or molded into road barriers and truck flaps.
The core claim is that it's the only process that separates all three in a single pass. Compared with today's alternatives, it's also considerably cleaner.
Most tire recycling still creates petroleum dust, burns tires in cement kilns, or leaves them to leach chemicals into the ground.
There's also a public health angle. Tires left in open piles collect standing water, where mosquitoes breed. This is especially dangerous in countries where mosquitoes carry serious disease.
Generating Credits before Revenue
Vince celebrated his patent award by going back to SCHOOL!
He licensed the patent and took it to a university where three straight cohorts of Temple senior-design students built the as we know it machine as coursework.
V1 was a tabletop version of the jaw-crusher, then V2 added the rollers, then V3 gets us to the full unit that sits in the lab today.
His R&D team was a rotating class of undergrads improving the prototype one semester at a time.
The professor who took them on was Dr. Kurosh Darvish. He's a biomechanics researcher, not a rubber researcher, but he teaches engineering design. This was exactly the kind of project for his students.
It broke iteration into manageable stages, each with something they could build, test, break, and improve.
Vince's previous company got into Governor Cuomo's Startup New York 2014 program which tied to a partnership with SUNY Cobleskill.
The program eventually got shut down and his company went with it, but here is where the university partnership approach crystalized.
As soon as he was back in Philly, to Temple he went.
Turning Liquid Nitrogen into Second Chances
Vince spent ten years in federal prison. Years later, he found himself working on a new technology built around the idea of re-entry: giving discarded tires a path back into use.
The student-built model got the machine working, but it also hit a ceiling. Next steps for commercialization are optimizion + automation.
To achieve this, the team brought in Mehrdad Swizi, a PhD student in biomechanics. That step brought the first money from outside the university through a Pennsylvania state grant.
The state representative who backed it wasn't sold on the chemistry so much as on the jobs a full-scale plant would create, since running two million tires a year takes people to collect them, haul them, and keep the line moving.
Those are the jobs Vince wants going to people coming out of prison, giving them a chance to build something instead of being defined by what came before.
It's also the same bet he made when he handed the machine build to a class of students instead of a room full of investors.
Vince’s philosophy has stayed the same ~ give people a real problem, the tools to solve it, and the opportunity to prove they can.
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With love, Blake
See you next week!
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