- Andres Salazar
- Eco Green
- North Salt Lake
Concept drawn up on a napkin turns into worldwide environmental tire recycling business
The vision of Eco Green Equipment was sketched on a napkin while founders met with their first prospective customer and explained the concept of their tire recycling facility. Since then, Andres Salazar and his team have been hard at work to address one of the world’s greatest challenges: Millions of tires reach the end of their life and are discarded into landfills, dumped into the oceans and left alongside roadways.
Eco Green Equipment takes rubber recycling to the next level. Their team of engineers, designers, marketers and innovators loves to expand normal boundaries in the recycling industry and fulfill their vision to better the environment, develop organizations and build better relationships in communities around the globe.
As a global leader in cost-effective turnkey tire recycling systems, Eco Green Equipment delivers optimum production performance and profitability at the industry’s most affordable costs for tire-derived shreds (TDA), wire-free chips, rubber mulch, crumb rubber and fine rubber powder used in a variety of applications worldwide. They repurpose the material from what was once described as a blight — tires dumped wherever there is extra space — and turn it into thousands of valuable products instead of being discarded as waste.
It took many years for Eco Green Equipment to “look good on paper.” Prior to 2020, the company was in growth mode — constantly investing in equipment and resources — and didn’t turn much of a profit. Salazar’s dedication to the dream he once sketched on a napkin kept him pushing forward. In 2019 Eco Green relocated to a 20,000-square-foot building and, after their incredible success in 2021, are set to relocate to a larger space.
They attribute their growth and increase in sales to the efforts of their sales force and the amount of equipment their production team was able to deliver. Salazar takes pride in maintaining very satisfied customers who give excellent references along with continued innovation and research and development to provide new ways of recycling materials. Eco Green Equipment is on target to reach its 2022 projected goals of over $9.4 million in revenue.
Eco Green Equipment has worldwide distribution partners in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Eco Green Equipment is now used in 27 countries and they are still expanding. International growth has offered Eco Green advantages that they would not have been able to attain in just the U.S. market. They have worked with the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, the Small Business Development Center and are currently in the process to obtain the SBA STEP Grant from World Trade Center Utah, which will help them continue to grow internationally. They said that their number one reason they decided to reach markets outside of the United States is to improve their potential for expansion and growth.