Green has two meanings; finding profitable markets for environmentally friendly products.

• Author: Marbaugh, David

Let's face it. It can get pretty depressing. We are bombarded with the apocalyptic news of disappearing rainforests, a depleting ozone layer and vanishing resources.

Instead of feeling blue about our environmental fate, several Indiana innovators are thinking green. From finding novel ways to use discarded tires to developing an alternative to peat moss, they're putting technology and ingenuity to work and discovering profitable markets for environmentally friendly products.

Syntene Co.--Each year approximately 250 million tires are discarded in the United States, most of which migrate to overburdened landfills to sit atop the 3 billion tires already there. But a new process developed by the Syntene Co. of Richmond could stop some tens of thousands of these tires dead in their tracks.

Syntene recently was awarded a major contract by Ford Motor Co. to turn recycled tires into a variety of auto parts. The first is a brake-pedal pad that will be used on some Ford Windstar minivans produced this fall.

The brake-pedal pads contain at least 50 percent recycled-tire content. They cost less to produce, weigh less and meet or exceed quality levels of the parts they replace.

After working on the technology for nearly nine years, Syntene seems to have found a viable solution to recycling tires. Released as a commercial product only six months ago, the solution involves taking discarded tires through a multiphase process that breaks down the chemical components of the tire. The tires are frozen, ground into a fine powder, magnetically separated, screened and sorted.

Through Syntene's patented technology, this powder residue is then blended with polymers$and compatabilizers. The substance becomes a rubber compatible with standard processing equipment.

"What that means to the end user," says James Gunnigle, vice president of global sales, "is they now have a product that affords ease of processing, and they have a product with very high recycled content."

Once one of these recycled products has played out its life cycle, say as a new brake-pedal pad, it then can be recycled easily and continuously by this process.

Gunnigle says all lines of Ford automobiles eventually will use brake-pedal pads made from Syntene's recycled tires, helping to reduce solid waste in landfills. Meanwhile, Ford is exploring other uses for the recycled rubber such as carpet backing, splash guards and weather seals.

Syntene has been exporting the new product to Europe since the...