Old Tires and Plastic Turned Into Board : Recycling: Tinkerer turns waste into usable product that saves trees and is as hard as wood.

Jim Rosenbaum remembers when he couldn’t impress anyone with the ideas he had for old tires.

He had made planters, birdbaths and volleyball standards, the usual stuff. But a few years ago, Rosenbaum cooked up a board--as hard as wood and more durable--from bits of tires and other plastic waste.

“Now I can make something out of old tires and people get excited,” Rosenbaum said. “It starts out as waste and becomes a usable product and definitely saves a lot of trees.”

Rosenbaum moved from his Oklahoma ranch last spring and, with the help of some tax incentives, took over an empty manufacturing plant in Muenster, a tiny town 50 miles from Dallas-Fort Worth, known for its German restaurants.

Since then, his Renewed Materials Industries Inc. has sold a few million dollars worth of ReCyc Lumber.

Boxes of shredded tires, shampoo bottles and milk jugs are stacked to the ceiling and feed two production lines at the plant. Perhaps surprisingly, there is little odor and virtually no waste.

An estimated 250 million tires are discarded annually in the United States, a headache in landfills where, if left whole, they can trap gases and float to the top.

“We don’t even scratch the surface with what we use,” Rosenbaum said.

He said he frequently turns away callers who offer tires. RMI instead gets scrap from companies that are paid by the state to shred tires. Texas is one of two states with a special tax on tire sales to pay for shredding.

RMI’s customers so far have been farmers and ranchers who are resurfacing their animal trailers. But the company’s distributors also tout ReCyc Lumber’s use for barn flooring, patio or marina decking, anyplace where durability and resistance to rotting are factors.

At a recent trailer show in Dallas, marketing director J’Lynn Hare passed out samples that had been fashioned as calling card holders.

“Hardly a day goes by that we don’t get a call from somebody who says, ‘We’ve seen your board. Can we use it for this?’ ” said Fred Rosenbaum, Jim’s brother who moved from El Paso a few months ago to help build up production.

“You hammer it, you nail it, you cut it just like you do wood,” he said.

Indeed, the walls of an office off the production floor at RMI’s plant are built with ReCyc Lumber instead of wood.

ReCyc Lumber costs slightly more than most woods but less than fine woods such as oak. A typical 16-foot animal trailer can be re-floored for about $250.

The brothers have met with other manufacturers interested in a license to make the products, which can be formed in typical 2-by-4, 2-by-12 and other shapes.

There are about 500 companies nationwide that manufacture products from scrap tires and plastics, according to Recycling Research Institute, a Connecticut group that publishes the monthly “Scrap Tire News” newsletter.

“Most of the uses we see are for things like fatigue mats, bed liners for pickup trucks, flooring blocks for things like golf courses, swimming pools,” said John Serumgard, chairman of the Washington-based Scrap Tire Management Council, a nonprofit group supported by tire companies that promotes markets for scrap tire.