There are many different scales to measure hardness. Tiger uses the Shore A scale.
http://www.machinist-materials.com/hardness.htm Useful to understand what a "hardness rating" covers and what it doesn't.
I am gonig to tell you all this - after a week or so of play IT DOES NOT MATTER what your tip was rated at because almost all of them will be within a few points of each other.
At least these were MY FINDINGS way back in the day 1999-2002 when I thought I was going to be a huge player in the tip business with the "Instroke Tips".
I had a $300 Durometer and had set up a little spreadsheet to measure ten points around the tip and come up with an average hardness.
One day I decided to measure the hardness of all the different tips installed on all my cues and to my surprise the Le Pros, Elkmasters, Tigers, Instrokes, Mooris, etc were all within about 5 points of each other. So I said hmm..... I don't play with all of these cues equally so lets see what happens if I install some brand new tips and use a hammer to simulate play. And after hundreds of hits with the hammer all the tips were within two points of each other.
Shortly after that I gave up the tip business.
My theory is that when you become comfortable with a certain "hit" then you would like to have a tip that emulates that hit as closely as possible right out of the box. Then as you play you are not really aware that your tip is getting harder since it happens with each shot and you won't feel a difference from one shot to the next.
So basically you can use any tip that feels good to you out of the box and you shouldn't worry too much about the hardness "rating".
Recycled leather is generally leather that has been ground up into bits, mixed with adhesives and then pressed into sheets. Generally these sheets are very consistent in their properties as opposed to normal leather which can have quite a variance over the area of the hide in regards to durability, softness and thickness.
This is why Tiger skives the leather in relatively small pieces to exacting tolerances before laminating it.
I don't know what the Emerald tips cost. It has been my contention that until someone cracks the $1 per tip retail level with a laminated tip then Le Pro and Triangle will continue to dominate the market. If the Emeralds are close to that with the properties that make laminated tips desireable then they should capture some good market share.
Don't know about the green color though - easily fixed with a Sharpie
Edit: I see the price is listed at $4 a tip - well it's closer to Le Pro at least. Nice job on the install Tony. Very clean.