Agile, Mobile, and Profitable

Picture the last time you went shopping for your car’s tires. You were probably inundated with product recommendations, add-ons, weather-proofing, and so on.

Now picture that same conversation, except the tires are guaranteed to last a certain number of weeks, not years. That’s exactly what municipal solid waste fleet managers have to face when buying tires for their collection fleets.

The solid waste collection and processing industries require specialized tires for handling such heavy and dirty loads day in and day out. These tire requirements are important for equipment like skid-steers and skid-steers at trash processing stations and recycling processing stations, trash and recycling collection trucks in municipal fleets on city streets, and other vehicles involved in the waste and recycling processing industries.

“The waste industry uses a lot of material handling tires,” says Ryan Lopes, product manager for material handling and solid tires at Alliance Tire Americas, which is based in Wakefield, MA. “They are a consumable that has the highest cost in your budget. We look at tires in terms of cost per hour, the total cost of ownership.”

Municipal waste collection trucks and recycling collection trucks face daily wear and tear, and the tires that fleet managers choose for these trucks can make or break a fleet’s effectiveness and efficiency. Some trucks within the same fleet may even need different types of tires based on the current weather conditions, the difficulty of their route in terms of terrain, and other considerations, says Tom Clauer, Yokohama Tire senior manager of commercial and off-the-road (OTR) product planning. Yokohama Tire’s US operations are based in Santa Ana, CA.

“The essential first step is making sure you have the correct tire for the specific application,” says Clauer. “Waste equipment can run in a variety of road surfaces, routes, and conditions.”

For both urban and residential trash and recycling pickup, front loaders and side loaders need 10,000-pound capacity tires for the steer axles, he says. “These units have much more stop and go, along with a lot of slow-speed turning, which lend to rapid tread wear. Some companies measure wear by weeks, not miles—it’s that severe.”

The next step on the waste collection and processing chain is transfer trucks. These transfer trucks, usually tractor trailers, transport waste and recycling down highways, then onto transfer stations, Clauer says. Those stations are often paved with gravel, sand, and/or dirt that can wear down tire tread. Navigating across the transfer station can mean driving over trash to get to the proper dump site, as well, he adds.

With all of these considerations, transfer trucks need tires that can address uneven, dirty terrain, as well as treks along highways, Clauer says.

With both municipal collection and transfer trucks, Clauer says it’s important to pick tires that have a strong history of retreadability with “substantial casing warranties” to back up claims of retreadability. He says casing life cycles are tracked and are just as important as the original tread life of a tire. A tire’s ability to be retreaded can significantly affect the cost of the tires chosen for a collection fleet because the ability to properly retread can provide “dividends with each retread” in cost savings. Likewise, the inability to hold a retread makes a tire a defunct product that needs immediate replacement.

Lopes says for vehicles used to process waste and recyclables, such as skid steers and loaders used at processing facilities, it’s important to note that they often require solid tires. Picking the right solid tire is important because the overall cost isn’t just the purchase price—it’s also the changeover costs and the cost of downtime from damage.

He says it can be extremely difficult to estimate the life expectancy of a tire because of the rough conditions at processing locations. Landfills in particular are notoriously tough on tires because jagged edges could be lurking on any surface. It’s the nature of the beast, of course, but it makes life difficult when fleet managers are trying to project next year’s tire budget.

“The irony is that tires are unpredictable because they are so heavily impacted by the environment in which they are working,” says Lopes.

He cautioned that a cheaper sticker price could actually end up costing the owner more due to a low time-based return on investment, which includes use time, time spent on maintenance, and operational time lost waiting to purchase new tires.

“A tire with a lower purchase cost that doesn’t last long enough can also have a deceptively high total cost of ownership, especially when you add in the cost of the downtime imposed by having to replace it more often,” says Lopes. “The sweet spot lies in a tire that delivers the most hours of service per dollar invested in it.”

The construction of a tire is important to consider when buying tires across the waste and recycling collection and processing industries. It may seem like just another part of a vehicle, but Lopes encourages others to think of tires as a business asset and an investment rather than a disposable product. “A well-built tire, with good rubber compound, is an extremely good investment.”

He says the way tires are made in today’s economy makes them more valuable than the rubber wheels of yore. To make a really good tire, you have to know a lot about chemical engineering, not only because of the combination of ingredients but because of the exposure to other chemicals and compounds that the tire will inevitably drive over on highways, landfills, and city streets. You’ll have to know about engineering due to managing the weight of the vehicle and ability to turn while handling that weight. You’ll have to know business—because tires can’t cost an arm and a leg, even if they are the foundation (the backbone, perhaps?) of your collection fleet.

Solid tires eliminate some downtime due to damage, he adds, since they can’t blow out or get punctured like pneumatic tires. However, that doesn’t mean they’re immune from damage. Those jagged edges from trash, metal recycling, or stones we mentioned earlier? They can literally take a chunk out of a tire, compromising its integrity.

“Even a foam-filled tire is compromised when a casing is torn, and in fact, you’ve then lost the cost of the tire as well as the considerable cost of the foam,” he says. “In a situation like a transfer station or a recycling center that handles metal, a pneumatic tire just isn’t going to last—it could be weeks, or even days, and it’s lost to a puncture.”

He says solid tires are a clear choice for processing center equipment since they can last about three times as long as a pneumatic tire. The cost of a blowout or puncture is higher than a lost tire, of course, because maintenance costs and cost lost to downtime will expand that cost. And if a blowout is particularly bad, it can damage the bearings or other parts of your vehicles from the resulting thud that will inevitably occur when your skid steer realizes it can’t fight gravity. This could, at best, require easily-accessed replacement parts or, at worst, put an entire piece of equipment out of commission in the middle of a job.

Lopes also recommends looking into radial tires for waste collection and processing equipment that is used for running longer distances on dirt or pavement that is relatively clear of debris. He says they provide better fuel economy and longer service life than bias-ply pneumatic tires and could be a good option for transfer trucks that haul waste and recycling hundreds of miles or more.

What questions should you be asking before buying? Tire experts have some tips for what to consider before pulling out that credit card:

1. Do you need solid state, pneumatic, or radial tires? (Some of the following questions can help answer this question.)
2. What type of terrain will your vehicles be driving on?
3. Under what kind of weather conditions will your vehicle be driving or hauling? Temperature can affect tires, and rain, snow, and ice can create dangerous conditions that require special considerations, especially for heavier trucks.
4. Will your vehicles have to handle multiple terrains in one job? What are the considerations of each type of terrain? Don’t ignore any surface types when considering the best tire for the job.
5. What weight will your vehicle be ­carrying? For how long will it carry that weight?
6. Will your vehicles be driving long distances? Under what conditions?
7. Will your vehicles be subject to frequent stops? Under what conditions?
8. Will your vehicles be making frequent turns, especially at slow speed?

Of course, the important considerations don’t stop when a tire is purchased. When it comes time to do maintenance on each type of tire for each step of the trash and recycling industry’s processes, each tire requires a unique touch.

Clauer says it’s essential to do daily inspections of tire sidewalls and tread on municipal collection trucks. Damage to sidewalls is common and can occur inside the pneumatic tire, so maintenance experts will have to get under the truck to do a full inspection.

“I have seen everything from mixer beaters to pliers stuck in the treads of these tires, and yet the tires were still fully inflated!” he says.

One fascinating aspect about modern tires is their ability for fleet managers to maintain them and buy new tires using data-driven analytics.

“The information they can collect ranges from just GPS routes to G-force measurements. GPS can give route information that can reduce the mileage it takes to cover a select area, saving time, turn, and wear,” says Clauer.

Data can now replace manual logs and anecdotal evidence about what is causing wear and tear to tires. In addition, it can help identify some of those human-specific tendencies or even rough areas of a route that are causing costly wear and tear.

Measuring values like G-force—­gravitational force, which is the force acting on any object as a result of gravity or accelerating—helps when choosing which tires to buy because you’ll have a better sense of what treads and/or tire construction you’ll need to achieve the right traction or resistance to wear that is caused by those G-forces, Clauer says. Today’s data collection devices can ­measure laterally and radially.

Lopes says remembering that tires are an investment can help keep your focus on your business’s bottom line. Picking the wrong tire or a too-cheap tire could actually cost you money in the long run in maintenance costs.

And disabled trucks on the sides of highways or job sites cause expensive delays, maintenance costs, and even complaints from customers—especially when talking about city trash collection! No city resident is happy when their trash pickup is delayed, but delays due to something perceived as “simple” by the public could damage your company’s relationship with those customers and add a stink to your quarter’s budget.

“Recognizing the large investment represented by your tires, and the high opportunity cost presented by downtime, is the first, key step in getting greater return from your tires,” says Lopes. “With that in mind, you can easily see the value of choosing a tire with the lowest total cost of ownership, then managing it through rotation and observation to maximize the service you get from that tire.”