SSI earns loyalty of Minnesota tire recycler

Monte Niemi, the owner of Isanti, Minnesota-based First State Tire, says he purchased his first SSI shredder in 1988, when his recycling company was still based in East Bethel, Minnesota. After moving to a larger facility in Isanti, and with the purchase of additional shredders in 1999 and 2016, Niemi’s company has grown from processing 1 million tires per year to more than three times that, according to a news release issued by Wilsonville, Oregon-based SSI Shredding Systems.

First State Tire recycles tires from passenger vehicles, trucks and some recreational vehicles. Tires that

are no longer considered road worthy are shredded in a two-pass system that creates a material called

tire derived aggregate (TDA). The engineered aggregate is used in civil engineering applications including roadway bedding, embankment support and stormwater management.

“SSI kind of spoiled me by saying what are you asking for? What do you need? Let’s try and build it,” says Niemi of his relationship with the equipment firm. “To have a company you can go to and say. ‘Here’s my bottleneck, here’s what I need to fix,’ and the company is willing to listen and try to make it happen is the night and day difference between why we’re buying this equipment versus somebody else’s.”

SSI says Niemi has the distinction of being one of the oldest continuously operating users of SSI equipment. By Niemi’s estimate he has shredded more than 50 million tires and he has no plans to stop adding to that total, he says.

Regarding his loyalty to SSI, Niemi comments, “What we’ve learned essentially through the 30 years of running equipment is that you need [to work with a company] that has a good support staff, you have to have [a shredder] that’s well designed in the first place, and you have to have something that’s not going to self-destruct.” He continues, “When we came in contact with [the] people out in Oregon who made the SSI shredders, they had equipment that made sense and we’ve been very successful with it.”

SSI has helped First State Tire produce a video documentary on the family-run business and the impact it has made in its community, which can be viewed here.

SSI Shredding Systems engineers, manufactures and services size- and volume-reduction systems for a variety of market sectors, including scrap metal, solid waste and tires.