Interview: Accella's tire-fill business 'green' and 'growing'

Berea, Ohio – When Accella Performance Materials began revamping its tire fill business, its plant in Berea was a logical place for investment.

“It’s the centre of R&D in both the chemistry and the applications and the machinery end of the business,” said Robert Cunningham, the company’s vice president of technology and innovation.

This role as centre of chemical research and development for Accella’s Tire Fill division is a new one for the plant. The company recently renamed its tire fill division, bringing together acquisitions from recent years and consolidating and reconfiguring the operations at its plants.

Late last year Maryland Heights, Missouri-based Accella, a manufacturer of polyurethanes and recycled rubber products, announced the renaming of several of its core businesses to Accella Polyurethane Systems including, IPS Polymer Systems, MarChem, Arnco Performance Polymers, Premium Spray Products, Burtin Polymer Laboratories; and its ArncoPathway and Zeus Tire Fill businesses.

The name changes took effect 1 Jan.  Accella processes polyurethane coatings, binders, elastomers, rigid and flexible foams and polyurea sprays, as well as recycled rubber products.

At the time of the announcement, president and CEO Andy Harris said the new name “better reflects Accella’s strategy to build the leading polyurethane systems house. In combining national manufacturing locations with a national sales network, we provide the speed and scale to enhance our customer’s performance and profitability.”

Cunningham called the company’s Berea plant “tremendous,” noting it has plenty of lab space and the region has a strong pool of research and manufacturing talent, so “it’s a good place to hire.”

The Berea location is the home plant for Al Restaino, the company’s vice president of marketing. He said when he joined the company in early 2014, the decision was made to spread the senior leadership team out over the company’s different locations. Overall, the company has about 520 employees and makes about $450 million (€388 million) in annual sales, Restaino said.

Accella’s tire-fill business makes a material used to fill pneumatic, or air-filled, tires to essentially make them “flat-proof,” Restaino said. The tires are filled with polyurethane gel, which then congeals. The brand name for the material is TyrFil.

It’s useful in industries such as mining or construction, where a flat on one of the large tires used on equipment would hurt production. Accella Tire Fill also makes the equipment that is used to fill the tires with the material.

Small but powerful

The company’s Berea plant has been through a number of changes in recent years.

It was previously a part of Arnco, which Accella – then known as Dash Multi-Corp. – acquired in 2013. Pathway Polymers was acquired the same year, and the two companies’ names were soon combined. In 2014, the companies that had made up Dash became Accella, which is owned by private equity firm Arsenal Capital Partners.

After the renaming of the ArncoPathway and Zeus Tyre Fill businesses at the start of 2016, Accella began consolidating at the Berea plant the research and development efforts at its plants in South Gate, California – which closed after operations combined with another California plant – and the company’s Chattanooga, Tenn., facility.

This included relocating equipment and hiring a Berea-based research and development director for tire fill, Cunningham said. While there are still some chemistry R&D staff members at other locations, including in Germany, they report to the Berea plant. The team is small – there are seven people total, with three in Berea – but R&D isn’t all that’s going on in Northeast Ohio.

Cunningham said Accella also is moving its manufacturing and technical service support for the tire fill division to Berea. Restaino said Accella focuses on selling complete solutions to its customers, so offering the combination of the material, the machinery and the technical support is important.

“That’s critical to how we approach the market,” Restaino said.

In addition to those updates, the company also intends to expand manufacturing for Accella’s other divisions at the Berea location. The plans are to “significantly expand” production in the tire fill and other product lines in at that site, Mr. Cunningham said, as well as to store products closer to end users in Canada and the Northeast U.S.

Spreading out

And the company has plenty of space for that.

Berea plant manager Sean Freed said the plant has about 112,000 square feet in office and manufacturing space on more than 14 acres, giving the company room if it needs to expand. It has seven lab spaces, though only three, including a quality control lab and a physical testing lab, are currently in use by the company. Cunningham said he expects the company to increase staff and open a new lab in Berea in the next few years.

Freed said the plant already has grown in the past nine months. Accella has added five full-time employees in that time, bringing the total to 18. Additionally, the plant employs two temporary employees who Mr. Freed hopes to bring on full-time.

According to Restaino, there has been about $750,000 in investments in the Berea plant in the past nine months, including the addition of some large mixing stations for the tire fill materials.

Matt Madzy, director of planning, engineering and development for the city of Berea, said he’s excited about Accella’s new focus on R&D at the plant and thinks it’s a “perfect fit.” It capitalizes on the tire and chemical expertise in Northeast Ohio and opens up the plant to developing new products, he added.

Restaino said there’s a slight lull in terms of the tire fill market because of the industries it serves – construction is strong, but oil and gas and mining are not – but that the outlook overall remains positive. And the other polyurethane businesses served by Accella are strong, particularly roofing insulation, according to Cunningham.

All of this means Accella is expecting Berea to play a big part in the company’s plans going forward. In an emailed statement,  Harris said he expects the Berea plant to play a “significant role” in the company’s future growth.

Restaino agreed, saying: “We really see the Berea facility as a world-class facility, and we’re building and leveraging off of what’s already here and adding to it to develop our position in the marketplace.”

Meanwhile, the company took the observance of Earth Day on 22 April to put a spotlight on how its flat-proofing solutions – including its environmentally friendly TyrFil product – are alternatives “to combat global tire pollution” by providing alternatives to landfilling tires while increasing performance and defraying costs.

Joe Negrey, vice president of Accella Tire Fill Systems, said  the company “created the ‘One Tote, One Tree’ campaign as part of a broader corporate initiative to enable our customers in the industries we serve to also take part in creating eco-friendly approaches to industrial production. Our brand is deeply committed to helping the tire and OTR categories deploy higher standards as it relates to the utilization of greener products. We believe that it’s a win for our customers, the industries we both serve, and the planet.”

The company said most Americans “probably don’t know that the US alone produces 290 million tires annually – and each year, a significant number of these tires age and are discarded, adding to the 4 billion tires already in our international landfills.

“Tires, of course, are a necessary and essential part of the global transportation industry. Their use in off-the-road industries such as mining, agriculture and construction, are pivotal to growing our planet’s infrastructure and economy — but this doesn’t change the fact that used, ‘tossed out’ tires are a major environmental pollutant.”

To help combat the proliferation of what it called “tire trash” cluttering the planet, Accella Tire Fill Systems said in a press release that it is partnering with industries to improve sustainability across the global tire marketplace.

“Accella has been taking steps for the past four decades to help mitigate the growing problem of tire waste in landfills by creating greater awareness around tire fill as a more environmentally supportive alternative,” according to the company. It claimed that using products to foam fill tires helps ease “environmental strain by helping to keep whole tire and scrap tire waste out of domestic and international landfills.

“When their useful lifecycle ends, ‘solid aperture’ tires (another common tire choice for industrial use) are most frequently landfilled, as these solid tires may not be ground into tire crumb and these scrap tire pieces are not bio-degradable.

“Alternatively, because it actually decreases the amount of old tires and solid tires discarded by the industry annually, using tire fill ensures that less tire waste goes into our environment.”

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This story first appeared on the website of Crain’s Cleveland Business magazine, a sister publication of ERJ. Material in the article about Accella’s Earth Day and recycling efforts came from a company press release.