Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Kid-friendly, nature-approved?

A Hudson company touts rubber mulch as safe for gardens and playgrounds. Critics aren't buying it. Plenty of consumers do.

By PHIL DAVIS
Published April 2, 2006

HUDSON - Dale Hawker planned to take it easy. Fish a little. Paint his Hernando Beach house. Maybe visit the Jim Beam factory in Kentucky.

He's a bourbon man. No question.

What he's not is a take-it-easy guy.

He sees a pile of shredded tire mulch on U.S. 19 and turns it into an international rubber mulch company that logged $3.2-million in sales last year.

He's intrigued by fake waterfalls, so he buys a waterfall company and truckloads of rock and begins designing his own. A philosophy major in college, he dabbles in thermal dynamics and mechanical engineering. He sews drapes and blouses for fun.

"You won't find me at a desk too often," the 35-year-old chief executive of Rubber Resources Ltd. said, pausing during an interview to explain to a concerned caller the basic chemistry that makes colors like "Plumtastic Purple" stick to crumbled tire chunks.

"I have to stay busy," Hawker said. "I'm one of those guys who has to have his hands in the dirt."

Before he moved to Florida in 1998, Hawker said, he chased storms across the Midwest and repaired hail-damaged cars in the mid 1990s. The relentless schedule wore him out. He made enough to buy a house on Hernando Beach, closer to his 11-year-old son than his home in Ohio was.

Driving down U.S. 19 one afternoon, Hawker spotted a pile of rubber mulch. The concept intrigued the natural salesman in him: weed-killing mulch without the bugs.

He ended up buying and selling truckloads of rubber mulch to nurseries. In April 2000, he founded Rubber Resources Ltd.

Tire recycling is a tough business. Shredding machines are expensive. Occasional fires at shredding plants gave the industry a bad reputation. Many of the people Hawker worked with early on are now out of business.

But the industry is growing.

Several states and countries have incentive programs to encourage recyling of used tires, which are difficult to dispose of in landfills. Crumb rubber is used for everything from road asphalt to garden soaker hoses.

Hawker saw profit in the end result, not the production process. Rubber Resources focuses on the production and distribution of rubber mulch. He has a plant in Hudson.

His company has two lines.

One grade is for gardening. It still has some wire, fiber and other materials in it. He also has a higher grade line for playgrounds. That rubber is passed through powerful magnets to remove all wire.

Rubber mulch is increasingly popular in children's play areas. But Hawker has to work hard to convince consumers his product is safe.

"I've eaten rubber chips at trade shows to prove my point," he said. "I've eaten quite a bit of rubber."

He hasn't won over everyone.

"We know we've got to do something with rubber tires," said Jeannie Hayes of the Florida Yards and Neighborhoods program in Pasco County. "Yes, it is recycling. As walkways and driveways, it's great. But organic materials break down and provide natural nutrients to plants. Rubber mulch doesn't."

Since mulch can get washed away in heavy rains, critics are concerned that rubber scraps will end up in local waterways.

The biggest challenge to Hawker's business was coloring. Few people were excited by the idea of covering their lawns with chunks of black rubber.

A few years ago, the industry put a lot of effort into standard-issue mulch colors such as cypress and red cedar and also in never-in-nature hues such as tropical teal. Hawker was right in the middle of it.

"It's like trying to paint a golf ball," Hawker said. "You can get paint on it, but how do you get the paint to dry without touching it?"

So Hawker plunged into chemistry, finally consulting a NASA small business assistance program for scientific advice. It helped him find a solution.

Hawker is currently defending that process in federal court. His company is one of three named by another company in a patent infringement suit in U.S. District Court in Missouri. Hawker said he never filed for his own patent.

"Patents aren't all they're cracked up to be," he said. "Why give away the recipe?"

In six years, he said, the company has logged about $12-million in sales, more than a fourth of that in the past year. He has clients in the United States, Canada, Central America and the Middle East, he said. He recently had one of his sales brochures translated into French.

Last year, he bought a faux waterfall business. He saw they were popular at gardening trade shows. And he was restless. He needed to exercise his creative side. He is now designing his own faux waterfalls.

"I'm threatening to take another year or two off," Hawker said. "Everyone knows I'll just get involved in another business. Like the waterfall business, that was supposed to be a hobby and now it's just taken off. It's just not in my nature to stop."

[Last modified April 2, 2006, 01:24:20]