Buyer Beware: Online vendor(s) falsely representing Urethane-Bonded Recycled Rubber as Vulcanized Rubber

Recycled tire crumb was originally vulcanized does NOT = vulcanized finished flooring

For nearly 3 decades, Kodiak Sports has supplied recycled rubber flooring to gyms, schools, athletic facilities, dealers, contractors, and commercial facilities throughout the United States.

Because of that experience, we believe customers deserve accurate information about what they are buying.

Unfortunately, we are seeing an increasingly troubling marketing practice online: ordinary recycled crumb-rubber flooring being represented as “vulcanized rubber flooring” simply because the recycled rubber came from automobile tires that were vulcanized during their original manufacture. Some others use the term "recompositioned vulcanized rubber"

Those are not the same thing.

And one current example deserves particular attention.

American Floor Mats Advertising Rolled Rubber as “Vulcanized Rubber Flooring”

At the time of this article, American Floor Mats maintains a product page prominently titled “Vulcanized Rubber Flooring Rolls.”

This is a fraudulent misrepresentation of the essential composition process of the flooring.

The page goes further than simply using the word “vulcanized.” It tells consumers that the flooring benefits from a supposed vulcanization process, including improved wear resistance, lower absorption and better performance. American Floor Mats also explains in its FAQ that its so-called Vulcanized Composition Rubber is made from material “harvested from vulcanized rubber tires” that is then formed into rolls.

That explanation is exactly where consumers should pay attention.

The fact that the tire from which crumb rubber originated was vulcanized does not establish that the subsequently manufactured flooring roll itself is vulcanized flooring.

Virtually all recycled SBR tire crumb originated in vulcanized tires. That does not transform every polyurethane-bonded recycled rubber floor made from that crumb into a vulcanized finished flooring product.

What actual vulcanization means

There is a real manufacturing distinction between urethane-bound recycled rubber and vulcanized rubber flooring.

A vulcanized mat undergoes a process in which the crumb is subjected to heat and high pressure to create stronger cross-linking between the rubber particles. The company expressly distinguishes that process from a urethane-bound product. 

That is fundamentally different from taking already-vulcanized tire crumb, mixing the particles with a polyurethane binder and manufacturing a conventional recycled rubber roll.

REGUPOL's own specifications make the distinction even clearer

REGUPOL is one of America's best-known manufacturers of recycled rubber athletic flooring.

REGUPOL does not describe its standard Aktiv rolled rubber flooring as a vulcanized composition rubber product. REGUPOL's own technical specification identifies Aktiv as “PUR-bonded SBR granules and EPDM color flecks.” PUR means polyurethane.

REGUPOL's Environmental Product Declaration provides even more detail. For Aktiv Core, the manufacturer's published composition is approximately 82.1% recycled rubber, 8.9% EPDM and 9.0% binder. Other products in the Aktiv family contain approximately 7% to 10.3% binder.

That documentation matters because American Floor Mats' page also tells customers that its product is virtually pure rubber with “less than 1% binder.”

If the material being supplied under this advertising is a REGUPOL polyurethane-bonded product, the discrepancy is not minor. The manufacturer's own technical documentation should control—not terminology invented by an online reseller.

Why this distinction matters to the customer

This isn't a debate over semantics.

A purchaser searching specifically for vulcanized rubber may be doing so because genuine vulcanized flooring can have different density, porosity, moisture resistance, wear characteristics, performance properties and manufacturing costs than conventional polyurethane-bound crumb rubber.

NorthWest Rubber and SurfaceCo productes an actual real 4' x 6' real vulcanized rubber mat - specifically notes that its vulcanized products have stronger particle bonding and higher density and are non-porous compared with its urethane-bound products. 

A seller therefore should not be able to take a conventional recycled-rubber product, point to the fact that its raw tire crumb was vulcanized 10 or 20 years earlier when it was part of a tire, and use that fact to imply that the finished flooring underwent a vulcanization process.

Using that logic, nearly every SBR recycled-rubber gym floor in America could suddenly be marketed as “vulcanized flooring.”

That would make the term essentially meaningless.