Does Rubber Flooring Promote Health?

Today, tires are sometimes utilized to provide the rubber for recycled rubber flooring. Many people are concerned about whether such flooring is safe for healthy living because tires contain a number of potentially hazardous compounds (either in the home or workplace). In this post, we've examined a few of these worries in more detail to determine whether they are justified.

Some individuals worry that recycled rubber, which originates from used tires, can contain lead or other pollutants. When an American environmental activist group discovered internal letters from the EPA that claimed they could not vouch for the safety of recycled rubber since not enough tests had been conducted, this idea really took off back in 2009. But are they bad for you?

Benefits

Actually, there are several advantages to adopting rubber flooring manufactured from recycled tires. The primary one is that the tires would have ended up in a landfill, where they may have sat for a very long time before decomposing. They would emit a great deal of poisonous smoke if they caught fire. In addition, fires can smoulder for years and are challenging to put out.

Up to 90% fewer tires wind up in landfills when they are recycled into products like flooring and playground mulch.

 

Concerns

However, the utilization of recycled tires can give rise to some legitimate worries. Benzene, toluene, arsenic, acetone, and other volatile chemicals are employed, in addition to heavy metals including nickel, copper, and cadmium. Lead may also be present in older tires. It has been discovered that certain compounds can leach from rubber in laboratory settings.

However, there are several significant discrepancies between these research and the real use of rubber:

The majority of the studies involved submerging the tire fragments in water-based solutions for days, weeks, or even months. When used indoors, the rubber won't be exposed to radiation at this amount or of this kind; when used outside, it won't be exposed at all.

The tire crumble utilized in the experiments was unwashed and raw. All of the metal is actually taken out of the tires during recycling, and the crumb is properly cleaned. Many of the volatile chemicals that would otherwise be present are removed just by these actions.

 

Recent Studies

Since these issues were brought up, several fresh research that concentrate on the behaviour of recycled tires in the real world have been carried out. All of these research concluded that rubber flooring is completely safe to use.

Despite the presence of some volatile compounds in the air above the surface (especially inside where there is less air circulation), the levels were modest and weren't deemed high enough to pose a health danger.

 

What does all of this ultimately mean? In essence, this means that many of the worries about the usage of recycled rubber flooring are unwarranted. This is a great alternative if you want to contribute to the environment and provide your employees some padding underfoot. Without endangering your health, it will assist in lowering the possibility of accidents (resulting from slips and falls).