SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007
The self-sufficiency and ingenuity the Hess Family relied on for decades in farming has helped it turn a tire pile into a successful rubber processing operation.
BY LINDSAY HOLST
Troy Hess, vice president of Mahantango Enterprises (Liverpool, Pa.), takes off his broken-in camouflage baseball cap and replaces it with a hard hat as he prepares to give a tour of his tire processing operation, improbably situated amid the rolling corn and soybean fields of central Pennsylvania. Hess wears many hats, both literally and figuratively. He is a tire guy, with a keen eye for high-quality rubber shred. He is a self-taught engineer, designing and upgrading the shredders, conveyors, and separation systems at the heart of his facility. But he was raised as a farmer, and his thoughts still turn to the land. Right now he is assessing the fields surrounding his operation and looking up at the sky. “We’re supposed to get thunderstorms today,” he says. “We’re due to get a good rain.” It turns out the rural location of this tire processing facility is no coincidence. The Hess family, like many farm families, diversified over the years from growing corn to hauling fertilizer to, most successfully, processing tires.
Mahantango (pronounced “mock-un-TONGO”) Enterprises is on 20 acres of the Hesses’ 300-acre property bordered to the north by the Mahantango River. Mahantango is an American Indian word, and Hess says the firm’s operations are inspired by the philosophy of the region’s original inhabitants. “When the Indians would kill a buffalo, they would use every part of it, and we said that’s what we wanted to do with a tire,” he says. “We wanted to recycle every part of the tire.”
Sure enough, the Mahantango yard contains the full gamut of tire components: stacks of removed rims, piles of steel tire wire, trailers stuffed with tires awaiting shipment for reuse, and, of course, mounds and mounds of shredded rubber. The yard might resemble many other tire-processing yards, but with one difference: Troy, his brother, Todd, and other Mahan-tango employees developed nearly all of the machinery that processed this material.
Troy Hess is incredibly reluctant to “toot his own horn,” as he puts it. Marvel at his mechanical skill and knowledge, and he’ll tell you that Todd is much better at fixing machinery than he is. Compliment him on the success of his business, and he’ll switch the subject to all of the people who made it possible. He’ll talk about Ken Spicher, his father’s best friend since childhood, who now does rubber mulch delivery and various odd jobs for the operation. Or Steve Kerstetter, Mahantango’s fire safety coordinator, who has been with the company for 15 years. Or John Allenbough, the plant supervisor, who has worked for the Hesses for more than a decade. Then there are three generations of Dresslers: Ernie, who works in the maintenance shop; his son, Rick, in plant maintenance; and his grandson and apprentice, Coty. But first and foremost, Hess will talk about his parents—Mahantango founder and president Roger Hess, whose vision and foresight made the company what it is today, and Leona Hess, who is “the glue that holds it all together,” he says.
Turning an eyesore into opportunity
Roger Hess grew up in Lancaster County, Pa., and moved to the Liverpool area when he was a young man. Troy and his two siblings, Denise and Todd, grew up in a large, red-brick farmhouse down the hill from the Mahantango operation, where Roger and Leona still live today. Roger had been a farmer all of his life, starting with tobacco and then expanding into corn, tomatoes, and soybeans. On the side he had a small trucking business, hauling coal, corn, lumber, and “pretty much anything,” Troy says. In the late 1970s, he picked up a load of old tires from a Sears department store. Instead of disposing of them, Roger decided to collect these and other used tires and store them on his farm.
“I think he was thinking back to the Depression years, when every piece of steel and rubber was a high-value commodity,” Hess says. “He thought, ‘This is going to come full circle.’ But the thing was, they really started piling up.” In fact, neighbors complained about the eyesore, and the town labeled it a “problem pile.” But Roger always knew he would end up using the tires that he stored, Hess says, and he and Leona began touring the country, deciding just how they would get their tire processing business off the ground.
Troy was just graduating from high school when his parents decided to build the tire processing facility. “I had to decide whether I was going to go to college or not,” he remembers. “Dad said, ‘You can go to college, come back, and help me run it, or you can stay here, help me build it, and run it.’
I figured he needed me more then than he’d need me in four years, so I stayed.” A selfless decision? Troy just shakes his head. “Well, maybe it was a safe decision, too. But it’s been quite a journey.”
In 1989, Roger Hess visited a Texas scrapyard that was selling an old 80-ton cracker mill with a 400-hp motor to an acquaintance of his in Wisconsin. The mill was old, rusty, torn apart, and lying in the weeds. “You have to put yourself in my dad’s mind frame back then,” Troy says. “He was in the hauling business then, most of his roots were in farming, and here’s this huge, industrial piece of machinery. He’s trying to decide, ‘Can this thing work?’”
When his acquaintance decided against the purchase, Roger bought the cracker mill instead, making it Mahantango’s first piece of equipment. It even came with a story: It’s said that actor John Wayne once invested in the machine, thus the Hesses dubbed it “The Duke.” It’s still running 18 years later as an integral part of the Mahantango operation.
Sitting in a local restaurant, Hess takes salt and pepper shakers and rotates them toward each other to show how the two big rolls of the machine crack apart 1¾-inch pieces of tire to remove the wire and the fiber within. He recalls how, in the company’s early days, workers would feed large pieces of tire directly into the cracker mill by hand. Later that year, the company worked with a machine shop to build its first shredder, which fed the mill even smaller tire pieces, but workers still had to load every tire into the shredder by hand. If they wanted to change the product, they had to move what was the facility’s only conveyor.
The young company almost didn’t survive. When it finally commenced production in 1989, there were almost no markets for its shredded material. “We were creating markets, developing equipment, and doing a lot of growing up back then,” Hess remembers. “Certainly if we hadn’t had other things going, we wouldn’t have made it.” The family earned extra money by continuing with its trucking and farming operations, including 30 acres of pick-your-own strawberries.
“In the beginning, there was so much to do that we all just kind of pitched in,” Hess says. “Then, you wake up one day and find that everyone has their avenues, everyone settles into what they’re good at.” So what are their individual strengths? “Denise handles accounting and dispatching, Todd seems to be good at just about everything: driving a truck, operating a loader or any other piece of equipment we have.” And Troy? “I just keep it all going. I enjoy making equipment run better,” he says. In terms of tooting his own horn, that’s as much as you’ll get from him.
Processing Progress
What began as a tiny startup has become a thriving 30,000-square-foot enclosed tire recycling operation, processing nearly 3 million tires a year and producing such specialized products as horse turf, Everlast brand landscaping mulch, playground turf, and foundation drainage material. A computer system controls the operation’s 40 conveyors and two shredders, which produce 1¾ inch, ¾-inch, and 3/8-inch rubber chips—as well as a 10-20 mesh once a new granulating line is up and running. Switching production now requires merely pressing a button, and the shredder operation requires the full-time attention of only three employees. One worker uses a loader to feed tires into a bin, one is in the tower controlling the shredder, and another is walking the plant floor. None of them needs to touch a tire by hand anymore.
Mahantango now has several thousand feet of conveyors, more than 25 magnets that range in price from $6,000 to $40,000, as well as primary and secondary shredders. Tire shredders are clearly different from those used to process other commodities. “We are not tearing steel apart. We are trying to cut a material that is flexible,” Hess says. Think of a dull pair of scissors attempting to cut through a rubber band, he says. A tire shredder must have sharp, tight edges to break the material apart. Due to the abrasive nature of rubber, fiber, and wire, “those materials can really wear your parts out,” Hess says. “You can go very hard with your steel, but it takes a lot to break a tire apart, and then your parts actually just break. There’s a fine line where you consider the integrity of the blade and also the wearing characteristics of the blade. The challenge that we all face in our industry is balancing those two components.”
The Hesses have experimented with that balance for the past 17 years, constantly modifying and changing equipment that, even today, they mostly designed, constructed, and repaired in house with help from an electrician and a local machine shop. They’re currently planning two shredder redesigns, which are mapped out on large pieces of draft paper—covered with penciled-in notes—on Hess’ desk. Wouldn’t it just be more efficient to buy a product designed for the job? Possibly, but it’s just not the nature of this company. “It’s simply in our blood to ask, ‘What can we do to make this system work better? What is the most efficient way?’” Hess says. “Twenty years ago, we had to do that to survive.”
When it comes to their talent for building and fixing things, the Hess brothers credit their father. “He would always force us to figure something out,” Troy remembers. “As a kid, if I was riding a snowmobile, broke it, and had to fix it, Dad would always know [how], but he forced me to think for myself and go fix it.” That’s part of running a farm, Todd says. “If something broke, you didn’t just call the local repair guy to come fix it. You fixed it yourself.” Denise recalls a 5-year-old Troy taking apart his Big Wheel tricycle and Tonka trucks and putting them back together.
Diversified operations
Sitting around a table in the room where the “family board” meets to discuss new ideas, Denise, Todd, and Troy explain how their operation works. “First, the tires come in,” Troy says. Mahantango’s suppliers include tire dealers, stores, landfills, other scrapyards, auto dismantling yards, and even car owners. The operation also picks up tires. “We’ll either send a route truck or spot a trailer, which we have in 150 locations in the area,” Denise says, including at truck stops and tire centers.
Every tire goes across the scale for payment, then a worker sorts the tires according to how the company will process them. This depends, Troy says, on whether they are car or truck tires, whether they are going to be sold for reuse or shredded, and whether they need additional handling to remove debris. That last task is “not glamorous,” Hess says. “It’s a lot of hand-picking. A few individuals will pick out pieces of metal, brake calipers, you name it.” Smaller debris, such as dirt and rocks, typically washes out once a tire hits the shredder, he says.
Workers stack tires ready for resale in an area where they load them onto trucks and ship them out. Tires for shredding go in a different direction. A worker operating a front-end loader or a crane with a grapple fills the automatic feed system with tires. They go through the primary shredder and then through a screen to get sized. “Some of these will get ground smaller through the secondary shredder,” Hess explains, “and some will go straight through to the cracker mill. From there, they will be sized again, and then we pull steel and fiber out of them.”
Not all shred goes through the cracker mill, though. “It really just depends,” Hess says. “There are some markets where you leave the wire and the fiber in the rubber, such as some [tire-derived fuel] markets and civil engineering applications.” In these markets, a certain amount of wire is permitted, he says, so long as it doesn’t extend out of the material.
For some products, the cracker mill is the end of the line. “The horse turf product is finished when it leaves our facility,” Hess says. Developed in conjunction with Pennsylvania State University more than a decade ago, the shredded rubber turf is mixed with sand for use in a horse arena. The company guides customers through its installation: how to put in the rubber, how deep to make the sand, and what size material they ought to use—typically ¾- to 3/8-inch chips.
Shredded rubber landscaping mulch requires one more step. Using proprietary technology, the company sprays the chips with paint—turning them dark brown, red-brown, light brown, gray, black, blue, or green—and allows them to dry completely before they are bagged or stored in concrete bunkers. The mulch is rapidly growing in popularity as a replacement for traditional wood mulch at residential and commercial properties because it’s more durable and allows better water drainage, Hess says. The siblings are satisfied mulch users: Troy has installed plain, tire-colored mulch at his house, Denise has the dark brown, and Todd plans to install some once his landscaping is complete.
Rubber’s risks and rewards
Fine particles, friction, and heat make rubber processing particularly prone to fire hazards, as Mahantango knows firsthand: The company experienced a large fire that burned for almost three days in September 1996. Rebuilding from the fire was a real challenge, Hess says. Today the company’s fire prevention plan includes a 2 million-gallon reservoir, a pump house, a charged water line running from one end of the property to the other, and six fire hydrants around the facility. “We also have smoke detectors, heat detectors, and alarm systems, and the plant is cleaned every night,” Hess says. The facility’s electric room is contained and separate from the rest of the operation, and the bearings on different pieces of equipment are temperature-monitored.
Because storing high volumes of small chips in one area creates a risk of spontaneous ignition, Mahantango is building new rubber chip storage areas that will have 30-foot corridors between them. “We are constantly making changes so that we don’t have another [incident],” Hess says. “We’re constantly checking the piles, and we have separation between the piles and the buildings. When you watch your whole facility burn, you kind of see your life flash in front of your eyes.”
Later, Hess is kneeling down beneath the granulator he is preparing to install, peering up inside at the long rows of blades. When operational, he explains, a steel screen fitted over the cylinder will determine the size of the rubber pieces the granulator will produce. The rubber will then move on conveyors beneath various magnets and through separation systems that remove residual pieces of wire, then it will go through another, smaller screen to produce the final product: granulated crumb rubber. Hess and two of his employees have designed and built the line, which he hopes to have operational within the next year.
Standing up, Hess dusts off his faded jeans. “The fiber separator in this granulating line probably has about a 50-percent chance of working,” he says. If it doesn’t work, he won’t be too worried. He’ll simply take it apart, fix it, and put it back together again. “We’ve spent millions of dollars in research and development, so we don’t mind throwing $1,000 into a machine. As long as we learned something from it, it was worth it.”
He looks out over his surroundings. Rambling stretches of soybeans and corn still surround the facility on all sides, but the Hesses now lease out most of their farmland—all but a 1-acre vegetable garden for family and friends to use. A steadily diminishing stockpile of tires remains on the property, though, and it continues to draw some negative attention.
Hess recalls when a neighbor complained to the local newspaper about the tire pile. The family decided to create a little goodwill by plowing that neighbor’s driveway after the next snowfall and inviting him to tour their operation. (The Hess brothers also have killed snakes in kitchens, helped remove old fences, provided tire rims to use as barbecue pits, and shoveled snow off of roofs, all in the name of community service.) “We realize it’s our job to make sure that the community understands what we’re doing,” Hess says.
At next summer’s end, when the company expects to have processed the last stockpiled tire, the Hesses plan to throw a huge party and invite many of the neighbors. “We’re going to have entertainment, we want to get the officials from the Department of Environmental Protection in, our congressmen, everyone,” Hess says. “It’s taken a long time for us to get to this point, and we’re going to celebrate.”
Lindsay Holst is assistant editor of Scrap .