Studies on the performance, health and safety effects, air emissions, and recyclability, and the development of mixing standards for RMA are underway. Nearly 8 million scrap tires are cut, stamped, or punched into hundreds of different products every year. An additional 20 million whole or chopped scrap tires become fill and cover material in construction and landscaping, artificial reefs and breakwaters for beach erosion control, playground surfacing material and equipment, highway and race track crash and sound barriers, boat dock shock absorbers, and even materials for building houses. Farmers and ranchers use about 2.5 million whole scrap tires for holding down covers on hay stacks, controlling erosion, protecting structures from livestock damage, as rollers in corn husking equipment, and many other uses. The use of scrap tires for fuel increases every year, and is currently the largest single use of scrap tires.
Tires contain less ash than most types of coal and less sulfur than bituminous coals.
Burning whole tires saves shredding costs, but may increase the cost of transportation and storage. Another potential technology for converting tires to fuel and other products is pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is the thermal distillation or decomposition of organic materials into oils, gases, and char. Pyrolysis has been proposed as a method to break down tires into salable products including steel, oil, gas, and carbon black. Despite many efforts to commercialize this technology, it is not yet economically viable in the United States.