LIBERTY TIRE RECYCLING, INC 

(Formerly Georgia Tire Recycling, Inc, formerly Recovery Technologies Group of Georgia, 

formerly Waste Recovery, Inc) 

Dewey Grantham, Jr. 

1593 Huber Street, NW 

Atlanta, GA 30318 

(404) 355-0547 

Facility address: SAME 

 Tire-Derived Fuel varies by region. 

A lot of people in this industry is pretty tight-lipped. 

SSI costs --> seems a little high. Their equipment is pretty poor. 

Typically, it costs in the range of $35-40 per ton to produce a 2-inch rubber chip and extract a 

good percentage of the wire and fiber out of it. It’s not cost effective to try to remove 100% of 

the wire, and it’s very hard to do that on a larger chip, because the rubber’s bigger. The only way 

to get it out is to pull the wire through. Cut the chip in half, half the energy to pull the energy 

through. 

When someone tries to provide 100% wire free material, they try to produce a very small product 

because it’s achievable. We use a grinding equipment (granulators). We’ve been here for 21 

years. The equipment was designed and built by the facility (Waste Recovery Inc.) that opened 

this facility; was ahead of their time. They were the pioneers of the tire recycling industry back 

in the 1980s. 

Back in the 1980s, state started to regulate and when they came out, that’s when waste recovery 

started to build facilities. At some point they had 5 or 6 facilities nationwide. 

Contracts: No contracts. We deal with the broker as well. And there’s one common broker, 

called MA Associates. I believe the way the process works is they provide a sample and the 

paper mill or cement kiln or power plant will burn the sample and do an analysis and determine 

if they can actually use a lot of that product or not. If not, they would tell you what’s high and 

what’s low. I’ll tell you one thing that you need to know is that it’s very complicated for most 

processors to make changes to the product that they produce without some significant investment 

in the equipment they’re using. 

We do actually remove the wire, but not 100%. You know, if you looked at my product, you 

would see wire exposed and feel wire exposed, but comparatively speaking, it looks very clean. 

The thing with wire-free in TDF is if there’s too much wire, it clumps together in big balls (big 

spike of energy or fire that you can’t control). 

Differences in what’s asked. I wouldn’t know the answer to that question. 

I’ve discovered that a lot of people when they burn TDF, they tend to run into problems with 

their equipment; their first response is that the response is TDF related. From my experience, the 
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people who have had problems with material with heavy wire content, is because, like I said, the 

material clumps together, and they have problems feeding it into their system. 

TDF is less profitable, but at the same time, most of the other products are seasonal, where TDF 

is year-round. It probably costs me approx. $40/ton, and on average, I net around $30/ton. I lose 

$10/ton just making TDF, but I have to have somewhere for that rubber to go, I can’t sit on it for 

a year. State regulations, can’t accumulate tires. Can’t exceed storage levels without 

consequences. 

MA Associates, they broker about 80% of TDF in the U.S. (913-663-0100). Owns and operator 

Mike Sorcher, and he’s been around forever.