March/April 2013
Over the past three decades, the Vincents have blazed a trail in tire recycling for others to follow. Though that road has been rough at times, they’ve mastered the trade and built a successful multigenerational business.
By Kent Kiser
“You’ve got to be tough to be in the tire recycling business,” says Bill Vincent. He should know. The founder of Colt Inc. (Scott, La.) ventured into tire recycling when it wasn’t even an organized industry, just the dream of a few visionary entrepreneurs. Since 1984, when he launched his first tire-recycling business at age 43, Vincent has devoted his time to building a viable business in this challenging niche. Sons Kip and Kyle have worked with him from the beginning and now run the company; daughter-in-law Sydney—Kip’s wife—has been with the company since 1995. As with most pioneering efforts, the going often has been tough, but the Vincents’ success speaks for itself. Today Colt handles roughly 3 million scrap tires a year, making it the largest of the five state-permit-holding tire processors in Louisiana and among the 20 largest in the country, according to industry media. In short, the company is on a roll.
Building the Business
The town of Scott, population 8,000, is in the heart of Cajun country. On the road to Colt’s headquarters, Bill drives me past signs for Early’s Cajun Supermarket and Billy’s Boudin. When we arrive at the facility, we head straight for the company’s office, a one-story structure with a wood porch across the front, which makes it look more like one of the area’s ranch houses than a business office. On the porch are a bench and picnic table as well as several scrapyard cats. “C’mon into our home,” Bill says, opening the door to the office. It seems like an appropriate sentiment, given the welcoming surroundings and how the Vincent family has made tire recycling its professional residence for almost three decades.
A few of the framed items on the office walls are reminders of Bill’s earliest days in tire processing. A native Texan, his first entrepreneurial foray—at age 18—was in the laundry and dry-cleaning supply business in Fort Worth. After about 25 years in that field, which grew to encompass hazardous waste collection and disposal, he decided to buy a shredder to process steel drums at Superfund sites. The equipment salesman suggested he use the equipment to process tires as well. When Bill asked his local tire dealer if tire recycling had any promise, the dealer said yes, but he recommended speaking with Ed Filbin, a California businessman with millions of tires stockpiled on his ranch and ambitious plans to sell the material someday. Bill visited Filbin and was impressed by what he saw and heard. He subsequently sent Kip, then 22, to meet Filbin as well. At the time, Kip says, he “didn’t even know the size of a tire,” but he quickly was bitten by the tire recycling bug. He stayed in California for three months to learn from Filbin with the thought of launching a tire recycling business in Texas when he returned. “It was just in my blood,” Kip says.
In late 1984, Bill founded Texas Tire Disposal, their first foray into tire processing. Kyle, Kip’s younger brother, joined the company full time the following year. Tire recycling was a daunting industry at that time, they say, fraught with equipment shortcomings, regulatory hassles, bureaucratic red tape, market obstacles, shady characters, and economic challenges. They stuck with it, though, because they saw the market’s potential. In 1988, they expanded their industry presence by buying a crumb rubber facility named Tiregator in Houston, subsequently moving that operation to Mexia, Texas, then selling it, as well as Texas Tire, in 1990. After their one-year noncompete agreement with Texas Tire expired, the Vincents started Southern Tire Recycling, which operated from 1991 to 1993. They followed that with an 18-month stint using a mobile shredder to process tires for Emanuel Tire Co. in Baltimore. While doing that job, the Vincents decided they were ready to launch their next venture, founding Colt in 1994. Why did they choose that name? “It was our third choice—our first two names were already taken,” Bill explains. “It was just Western, and we’re Western guys.”
The family had a good reason to set up their latest venture in Louisiana: The state was about to implement a promising tire management program, and the Vincents wanted to get in at the beginning. While Bill finished up the Baltimore shredding job and started a tire processing operation for Emanuel Tire in Appomattox, Va., Kip and Sydney moved to Scott and commenced operations in 1995. The company’s first job was to shred tires on contract for Advanced Recycling Inc., an existing tire recycling firm, which then operated where Colt’s headquarters are today. ARI had a single-pass shredder, but it needed a contractor with more sophisticated equipment that could reduce tires to 3-inch chips to meet the Louisiana program requirements. Colt installed its mobile Triple/S Dynamics shredding system at the ARI site, and it was in business.
Everything went well until 1998, when officials from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality raided ARI’s facility and shut it down for alleged violations of the state program. The closure nixed Colt’s contracting job, but it gave the Vincents an opportunity. They negotiated a deal with the state to take over ARI’s business, including its trucks, property leases, employees, and state permits. Overnight, Colt went from being a two-employee contractor to a full-fledged processor with about 25 employees. “It wasn’t easy, but we did it—and we’ve been here ever since,” Kip says.
Efficiency Experts
In its new incarnation, Colt continued to rely on its old Triple/S Dynamics shredder—which Kip had helped design as a consultant to the manufacturer from 1991 to 1992—but workers had to feed tires into it by hand, which was a slow, laborious process. The mechanically minded Vincents knew there had to be a better way, so they set to work upgrading and modernizing their operations. First they bought a Barclay primary shredder in 2000 to feed the Triple/S system, then they replaced the Triple/S with a Granutech shredder, which “really increased our volume,” Kip says.
In 2007 the company took a significant step forward by installing a new Barclay shredding system. “That’s the biggest project we’d ever done at one time,” Kip says. “We redid the whole plant.” The system has three separate shredding units that reduce whole tires to 4-inch shred for use in civil engineering applications. The Granutech shredder is now part of a separate Powerscreen system that upgrades the shred from the Barclay line to 2-inch chips suitable for tire-derived fuel.
Though Barclay manufactured the components of the new shredding system, the Vincents mapped out how the pieces would fit together and operate most efficiently. They raised the system off the ground, for example, to allow dirt to fall through the equipment rather than accumulate in it. They calibrated the three shredders to operate at different speeds to maximize throughput, and they developed a method to get the maximum use out of each shredding blade: As each blade is sharpened, it gets smaller and is used in the next shredding unit down the line. According to Kyle, Colt can get 17 turns out of its Barclay blades and seven turns out of the blades in its Powerscreen system—much more than the typical blade life. Notably, Colt sharpens its blades in its 5,600-square-foot maintenance shop, grinding them to a tolerance of 1/1,000 of an inch. (Kyle’s son Chase—the sole third-generation Vincent in the business—manages the blade-sharpening duties.)
Colt finished its $4 million expansion in 2008, just in time for the latest recession. Instead of folding under the financial pressure, however, the Vincents continued to innovate to reduce costs and improve operations. To cut off-site storage costs for trailer parking, they hard surfaced more of the 16-acre Scott property and moved their trailers on site. The company started expanding its truck fleet with models that offer better fuel mileage. And it plans to move its old Triple/S and Barclay shredding equipment to its 7-acre tire collection facility in New Orleans. Currently the company hauls about three trailers of whole tires a day from New Orleans to Scott. By shredding the tires in New Orleans, it expects to cut those trips—and the related transportation costs—in half. “Being efficient is part of what we have to do to compensate for the increased cost of running this business,” Kip says.
Beyond innovation and efficiency, the Vincents say, service is a cornerstone of Colt’s success. “Dad has always put the service aspect first,” Kyle says. “He believes that’s how you get and keep the business. It’s not necessarily how much you charge. You take care of your customers, and everything goes well for you.” Service is especially important in the Louisiana tire program because no money changes hands between the dealers who generate tires and the processors who collect them—the processors get paid through the state program. So processors must offer something special in the way of service to gain and retain accounts. “We go out of our way to service our customers,” Kip says. “If they need us on Sunday, we’re there on Sunday.” Image and professionalism are part of the equation, too. Colt’s trucks are clean and are painted its signature yellow, its drivers wear uniforms, and its employees in the field are covered by workers’ compensation insurance, which protects Colt and its customers alike, Kip says. “How you conduct your business, your routing system, telephone communication with the dealers—it’s all service.”
The Vincents also agree that their family tradition of working together contributes to their success. Kip and Kyle did odd jobs for their father as youngsters, and both started working with him full time soon after high school. Sydney helped out at Southern Tire Recycling when she and Kip were just dating. After they married, she started working at Colt—first from home, then on site. “We get along very well,” Kyle says, noting that each family member’s talents complement the others. “Kip’s got his part in the business, I’ve got my part, and for any major decisions, we sit down together and work them out.” That doesn’t mean the Vincents always see eye to eye. “You’re going to have some disagreements,” he says, “but you just work through them and do what you need to do.”
Trials and Tribulations
Disagreements, problems, challenges—the Vincents have faced more than their share of them in their almost 30-year tire recycling career, and they must keep their troubleshooting skills sharp today. There’s the ongoing work of protecting existing markets and customers while developing new ones. Colt’s recycled rubber products face stiff competition from virgin materials such as gravel in the civil engineering market and coal, natural gas, and wood in the fuel sector. On the finance side, the company has found it difficult at times to forge relationships with banks “because there have been so many failures in this business,” Kip says.
Finding employees is no easy feat, either. The unemployment rate in the Lafayette/Scott area is lower than the national average, and Colt must vie for workers with the oil and gas industry, which offers higher pay and better benefits. To compete, Colt has changed some of its work practices to boost its retention of current employees—52 in Scott, 13 in New Orleans—and recruit new ones. Handling scrap tires is physically demanding, Kyle says, but the company “tries to make the work as easy as possible” by mechanizing tasks. The Scott facility has a trailer-dumping system, for instance, which spares employees from unloading trailers by hand. The operation’s wheel loader and skid-steers make it easier and faster to move tires and feed them onto the shredding conveyor. Colt also installed an air-conditioned tower for the plant manager (who operates the shredder), and it provides a clean, tidy employee building with a lunchroom, bathroom, and lockers. The company holds separate monthly safety meetings for its transportation, maintenance, and yard employees to not only keep their minds on safety but also let them know it cares about their personal health and well-being. For its drivers, Colt offers a weekly $150 bonus if they meet certain attendance and performance metrics. Though the company has not offered health insurance as an employee benefit to date, that will change soon as it complies with the requirements of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. “It’s hard to keep everybody happy,” Kyle says, “but we try, and we work to keep team players.”
The Vincents say their biggest boon—Louisiana’s tire program—also happens to be their biggest bane. On the plus side, Louisiana has the “best program in the country,” Kip asserts. Under the program, individuals pay fees of $2 per passenger tire, $5 per truck tire, or $10 per off-road tire when they purchase a new tire. Tire dealers collect the fees and send the money to the DEQ, which sets aside the funds to pay the five permit-holding tire recyclers in the state when they process tires and send the rubber to a market. The recyclers must submit paperwork to the state to request payment from the tire fund, receiving 7.5 cents per pound of rubber they market. The program pays processors only for handling “eligible” tires—those collected through tire dealers or brought to the recycling facility by state residents, who are allowed to drop off up to five tires a day.
The program’s weaknesses are its administration and management, the Vincents say. The DEQ often takes more than 60 days to pay processors’ claims, and the payments—when they do arrive—rarely are for the full amount requested. The program also hasn’t raised its payment rate since February 2001. “It’s set in law how much we’re going to get paid, and it’s been 12 years since we’ve had a raise,” Sydney says. “It’s not like a free-market system where you have some control over your prices.”
The Vincents refuse to resign themselves to the program’s limitations, however. Two years ago, Colt hired a lobbyist and launched a five-year effort to address the program’s shortcomings, especially the incomplete and late payment issues. The Vincents also say better policing of the program would prevent Texas and Mississippi tires from migrating into Louisiana. Because those tires weren’t purchased in Louisiana, they didn’t generate fees on the purchasing side, but they cost the state on the recycling side.
Moving Forward
Even with all the hassles in tire processing, the Vincents can’t see themselves in another business. “There are a ton of easier things to do, but I wouldn’t do anything else,” Sydney says. “I’m supposed to be here.” Even Bill, after trying retirement about eight years ago, realized he couldn’t leave tire recycling behind. “I love this business and the challenges it has,” he says. “As long as I have a clear mind and physically can handle it, I’m going to be working.” Today, he lends his expertise to Colt whenever requested—“I call them all the time and ask them to ‘Put me in, Coach!’”—and he serves as a consultant on other projects. In one recent project, Bill—working as part of Alabama Tire Recyclers, a joint venture of Colt and Emanuel Tire—consulted on a $6 million tire processing facility in Enterprise, Ala., which Alabama Tire now operates on contract. He also mentions a new, $50 million project in Pennsylvania named Entire Logistics—a partnership of Bill, Kip, and Emanuel Tire—that will burn scrap rubber to generate steam and electricity.
In addition to that new venture, Kip has an ownership stake in two companies in the asphalt rubber niche. The first, Elastomeric Materials and Services, sells crumb rubber and other additives to asphalt companies that have their own blending equipment. The second firm, FlexPhalt of Louisiana, is a blending contractor that uses its own portable equipment to mix recycled rubber and liquid asphalt at contractors’ facilities. These partnerships have played a role in major state and interstate highway projects in Louisiana, and Kip sees more growth for them—and the asphalt rubber niche—in the future.
Back at the Scott plant, Colt plans to continue refining its current operations to make them more efficient and productive. There’s certainly room to expand in terms of space and processing capacity. “We’re just running eight hours [a day] now,” Kip says, “so we have a lot of capacity to grow with the current equipment through a second and third shift.”
In the longer term, a logical next step for Colt would be to add equipment to upgrade its rubber to a ¾-inch, wire-free product, which it could sell as feedstock for crumb rubber or mulch—or the company could become a crumb rubber producer itself. Such steps would require additional investments in new machinery, which Colt is hesitant to make until it pays off its existing commitments. So, will the Colt of the future be considerably different than the Colt of today? “Hopefully,” Kyle says with a smile. “I hope we’ll still be moving forward. That’s the right direction.”
Kent Kiser is publisher of Scrap.
Giving the Recyclers a Voice
Bill Vincent has been a pioneer in both the tire recycling business and in organizing an association for tire processors. In the late 1990s, Bill and Norm Emanuel of Emanuel Tire Co. (Baltimore) invited tire processors from around the country to a meeting in Irving, Texas, with the goal of founding an association for their trade. The result was the National Association of Scrap Tire Processors, which had about a dozen charter members, Bill recalls.
In 2001, when Bill and Mark Rannie of Emanuel Tire were in Pennsylvania visiting a potential member, another visitor at the facility suggested that ReMA would be a good home for their fledgling association. Bill promptly called ISRI, and a day later he and Rannie met with ISRI’s executive staff to discuss a merger. The timing was ideal, as ReMA wanted to expand into the growing tire recycling niche. By late 2001, the deal was done. ReMA established the Tire & Rubber Division and Scrap Tire Processors Chapter to represent its new tire recycling members, who elected Bill the first division chair and Mark Rannie the first chapter president.
This merger gave the tire recycling industry a stronger voice and vast resources to promote and protect its interests, Bill says, and he couldn’t be happier with the results. “It has been an unbelievable experience,” he says. “We needed a united front, and ReMA gave us more than we ever imagined.”
Colt’s involvement in ReMA didn’t stop with Bill’s service. Kip was president of the tire chapter from 2009 to 2012, and he currently is a director-at-large on the ReMA national board. Sydney also helped the chapter develop its academic scholarship program under ISRI’s Recycling Research Foundation.