Extend the life of your concrete with Tuff Mix®

When recyclers think of wear parts, shredder hammers or knives, baler wear plates or the blades on a shear might come to mind. They likely seldom think of concrete, though in our experience concrete maintenance and replacement is the No. 1 overlooked expense in recycling facilities.

Your concrete slab is a wear part, and Tuff Mix offers an affordable way to extend its life without the need for specialized installation or extra costs.

Tuff Mix replaces the welded wire mesh, steel fibers, polypropene fibers and rebar normally used in concrete with a PVA, or polyvinyl alcohol, ad-mixture. The PVA is mixed into high-psi cement, bonding on the molecular level, to produce concrete with elasticity that ranges from 25 to about 40 GPa, or Gigapascals, and a tensile strength that ranges from 120 to 240 ksi, or kips per square inch. This results in a concrete slab that flexes under loads that would cause other reinforcement methods to fail.

“Tuff Mix is all about extending the life of your tipping pad or heavy-used pads,” says Greg Zito, senior vice president at Nycon. “With Tuff Mix, recyclers can extend the life of their concrete slabs by up to five times.”

In addition to extending the overall life of the slab, Tuff Mix reduces production downtime related to concrete repairs and lessens the maintenance required.

Installing a Tuff Mix slab is no different than installing a typical concrete slab; no special preparation is required, though the soil should be at least 2,500 psi.

Recyclers can work with their typical contractors and ready-mix concrete suppliers, substituting Tuff Mix for the traditional mix design, Zito says.

Once a Tuff Mix slab is in place, a facility can resume normal operations 48 hours later, reducing downtime dramatically.

Before installing a 40,000-square-foot Tuff Mix concrete tipping slab in 2011, Gerdau Ameristeel, Petersburg, Virginia, was replacing its concrete slab every 18 months. The plant needed heavy-duty concrete that could stand up to considerable abuse and the occasional 200,000-pound wheel load. By 2018, that pad had no cracks, displacement or deformation, delivering more than four times the longevity and saving Gerdau millions of dollars in replacement costs and lost production.

Isn’t it time you got more life out of your concrete?