In 2002 Star Rubber Environmental Ltd tasked its employees with the creation of a new type of playground flooring. In an attempt to lower costs for the end user, Star Rubber Environmental came up with a new type of rubber flooring called Tiger Mulch.
To achieve the creation of this new & innovative material Star Rubber begun their journey trying to cut back on global waste, as a result, their first port of call was old or disused truck tyres. Being cheap, easy to stack and transport, plus the fact that they’re readily available up and down the country, its easy to see why this was the material they settled on.
But how to turn shredded rubber tyres into a smooth & formable flooring? We cant simply pour out a few m2 of multicoloured rubber chips on the ground and call it a day, you might as well use wood chippings or gravel. No, the point of creating Tiger Mulch was not so that it could fall into the same category of pre-existing products, Tiger Mulch aimed to achieve something more.
With this motivation in mind, Star Rubber tried adding a high performance resin to the mixture. The hope being that this resin would make the mixture more malleable on site, similar to freshly mixed concrete or tarmac, thus allowing site operatives to pour and install with as little hassle as possible.
In the end, Star Rubber achieved what they were trying to do, by the end of the products development cycle they had created a flooring material that was cheap to make, easy to install, & surprisingly protective against impacts, even for a relatively thin pour.
Star rubber themselves have tested Tiger Mulch to BSEN1177 which examines critical fall heights for a range of surface thicknesses
- 40mm provides protection against a critical fall up to a height of 1.4 metres
- 50mm provides 1.7 metres
- 80mm provides 2.2 metres
- 120mm provides 2.8 metres
- 140mm provides 3.0 metres
The above statistics offer consumers a wide range of possible thicknesses, and confirms the maximum height someone could fall from onto the Tiger mulch before suffering what the Govt defines as a “critical fall”.
BSEN1177 defines a critical fall as one that is likely to cause trauma to a person’s head, however BSEN1177 does not include any provisions for calculating the safety of a surface in relation to broken bones, torn ligaments, or dislocated joints.
Realising that some customers will require more than impact protection, Star Rubber Environmental has also taken the time to measure their product against BS7188, which is the British standard measuring a materials resistance to abrasive wear and its resistance to slipping.
Tiger Mulch has the consistency and appearance of wood chippings, so is incredibly easy to apply, and with the critical fall heights detailed above you’ll know exactly how much Mulch you’ll need for your product.
