By John Seewer, Associated Press
SYCAMORE, OHIO – JULY 18, 2002
At Kirby Tire Recycling, the only sound amid the heaps of millions of tires is the hum from a machine grinding rubber into palm-sized bits. It is the sound of progress being made.
Ohio, like many states, is attempting to clean up tire piles that have grown from years of unregulated dumping and to find new uses for worn tires that are discarded each year.
In 1990, just one of every 10 tires discarded nationwide found another use. Now nearly eight out of 10 tires are being used again, according to the Rubber Manufacturers Association.
Some are burned to make electricity or chopped up and mixed with asphalt. A few are recycled into rubber mats, construction material, or spongy surfaces in playgrounds. The recycled tires at the Kirby site will be used as drainage layers in a landfill.
Americans discarded about 281 million tires last year, a whopping 5.68 million tons worth. Some 300 million additional tires are stacked in piles nationwide.
Cleaning up tire piles has taken on greater emphasis for states in the last decade because they are the perfect breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes and are targets for vandals.
On July 9, two men were each sentenced to four years in jail and ordered to pay $3.9 million in restitution for starting a fire in 1999 that burned one-fifth of the estimated 25 million tires at the Kirby site in north-central Ohio. Smoke could be seen as far as Columbus, 75 miles to the south. Oils from melting tires flowed into a creek, killing fish.
Ohio has spent more than $7 million cleaning up and monitoring the site since the fire. A court order has prohibited any more tires from entering the dump, one of the nation’s largest. To speed up the cleanup, lawmakers increased the fee that the state collects on new tires from 50 cents to a dollar. All of the money goes toward cleaning up tire sites.
Forty-three states currently have programs to get rid of scrap tires. Minnesota was the first state to get rid of its tire dumps, removing and recycling an estimated 2.7 million tires between 1988 and 1994. Illinois and Florida also have gotten rid of all but their smallest piles. California has cut its stockpiles from 30 million to 2 million, but about half of its newly discarded tires still end up in landfills.
Today, old tires in Oregon are sent to cement kilns or are turned into molded rubber products, said Bill Bree, a policy analyst with Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality. Most tires, though, end up in landfills. “It’d be nice if we could find a use for them,” he said. “But we’re not going to change that until we can find more uses for them.”
An estimated 40 million tires are in dumps around Ohio, the home to Goodyear Tire. State officials hope the increased fee on new tires will allow the state to start getting rid of the excess tires. “Eight years from now we should have all the known tire piles cleaned up in the state,” said Bob Large, director of the state’s scrap tire program.
Until 1996, Ohio didn’t have any regulations on scrap tire disposal, which allowed scavenger companies to buy old tires, reuse a few, and throw out the rest. “Tire shops were happy to see the tires disappear and didn’t ask questions,” Large said. “Unless you regulate, there’s going to be too many tires winding up in the wrong places.”
Ohio now has regulations on scrap tires that cover everything from how many tires can be at one site to rules on controlling mosquitoes. The state also gave out nearly $1 million in grants in March to projects using scrap tires, including the possibility of burning tires for fuel.
Many would-be inventors think they can find a new way to recycle or reuse tires, but only those using proven technology succeed, said Michael Blumenthal, a director with the Rubber Manufacturers Association. “Everybody wants to take garbage and turn it into gold,” said Blumenthal, who helps states with their scrap tire programs. “With tires, everybody wants to turn it into oil.”
