Salvadori, a company from Rovereto near Trento that had worked for 25 years in the tyre repair sector, producing machinery and equipment to repair and recover tyres, has come up with an innovative and profitable way to use waste tyres.

It has introduced a technology that permits recycling a product that is very important in everyday life but also potentially very polluting. In detail, tyres are cut, crushed and pulverised, and the steel and fabric parts contained in the housing removed, leaving black granules that become the raw material for producing technical articles. The rubber granules are used in flooring for playgrounds, synthetic coloured bark for flower beds or housing insulation. Salvadori manufactures both the machines that recover the raw material, such as shears, presses and wheel crushers, and the machines that reuse it (mixers, presses, moulds).

They range from simple tyre cutters, and semiautomatic and automatic machines that greatly reduce the clutter and facilitate the storage and transport of discarded tyres, to machines that bead tyres, automatically removing the metal parts and obtaining a clean product, ready for recycling. There are also shredders designed to transform tyres into rubber shreds and powder of various sizes, mixers and presses.

There is also a complete fully automated system, which includes all machinery in a single process and ends up with the production of sound insulating, thermo-acoustic and anti-vibration sheaths, as well as anti-vibration, draining and sound-absorbent paving for industrial and urban buildings. The plant has a production cycle that is able to obtain different sizes of rubber granules from used tyres, with simultaneous separation of steel and fibre.

The various phases of the process involve extraction of the steel ring followed by reduction of tyre volume through use of a crusher, grinding (during which the machine also tears out the strings of steel in the rubber and frees up the greatest possible quantity of fibres), separation of the steel that is then stored, fine granulation of the remaining material (rubber and fibre), and finally cleaning of steel and fibre residues from the rubber. Through a sophisticated system of filters, the machinery guarantees that the percentage of dust introduced into the atmosphere is lower than current standards require.

The idea is therefore highly innovative and in the name of saving and business, one that leads to recycling and reuse of tyre materials. But this is not the only innovation introduced by the Treviso company. Founded in 1982 as a structural mechanical specialist business by Giorgio, Anna, Igor, Paolo and Samuel Salvadori, the company designs and manufactures machinery and equipment for the maintenance, repair and rebuilding of tyres, conveyor belts and rubber rollers. It was the first in the world to produce a portable extruder, the product that brought it market recognition. In other words, Salvadori has a very flexible business structure that allows it to pay special attention to the problems of individual customers for whom it often produces tailor-made solutions.