| The
term 'recycled' is totally inappropriate in this context.
Recycling requires a closed loop, where the material goes through stages of manufacturing, use, collection, and remanufacturing into the same product. The off-gassing of toxins from tires continues nearly indefinitely no matter where they come to rest. |
Laid end to end, the tires that Ford Motor Co. has promised to replace on its sports utility vehicles and pickup trucks would stretch 6,000 miles.
Adding to that mass of synthetic rubber are 6.5 million tires recalled by Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. nine months ago.
To readers of headlines, those numbers represent an alarming mountain of waste. Yet representatives of an emerging scrap tire industry say it's a mountain of opportunity, and they'll snap up those discards just as they did in the earlier recall.
Highway surfacers in California, Arizona and Texas; playground equipment and construction material manufacturers in Florida; and power plant and cement kiln operators in the Midwest already use nearly three-quarters of the 273 million tires scrapped annually.
Recognizing that a surge of tires in a short period of time can pose health and safety problems -- as well as ending up dumped along back roads as the nation's most unsightly, unmanageable litter -- waste officials are preparing for the onslaught.
As customers begin to return the tires to thousands of auto dealerships and tire stores across the country, the California Integrated Waste Management Board is preparing notices to dealers on how to handle the 1.6 million tires that are the state's expected share of Ford's recall. They call the amount a blip among the 31.6 million tires that California drivers routinely get rid of every year, but say a swell could overwhelm dealers.
"If too many get piled up on their sites where they can't be stored safely, they can be targets of arson. They can harbor rats and, in places where water collects, mosquitoes," cautioned Martha Gildart, manager of the state's waste tire recycling program.
Individual tire dealers can store up to 1,500 tires without a permit. Car dealers can store only 500 tires unless they also sell tires.
Mark Hope, president of Waste Recovery West Inc., a scrap tire reprocessor in Livermore and Redding, already is seeing an influx of the latest batch of recalled tires -- drilled or slashed so they can't be reused. "We're like the milk truck. We pick up at a lot of Ford dealers, and we're seeing a lot of the recall tires coming in."
Waste Recovery uses up about 3 million tires a year, half for fuel at the Calaveras Cement Co. in Redding. The rest are chopped up for such civil engineering projects as drainage systems, backfill on sound-barrier walls, and even as an Interstate 880 ramp at Dixon Landing.
At Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Mich., Jason Vines, vice president of communications, said Thursday that the company was working to establish agreements with companies such as Waste Recovery that can either reclaim or destroy the tires (destroying tires is generally done by incineration, releasing tons of carcinogens into the air), which the company is replacing at no cost to vehicle owners because of safety concerns.
"We're taking this humongous amount of tires, first destroying them so they can't be used again, then finding the most efficient and environmentally friendly way to dispose of them," Vines said.
In the first round of recalls last summer, tires picked up in California and Florida were ground into rubber that ended up in roads, molded products or construction materials or were used whole as fuel in cogeneration plants and cement kilns. Tires collected in Virginia or Maryland went into fuel or landfill cover. Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Missouri tires were used as fuel in small and large-scale power plants.
About 6.3 million of the 6.5 million previously recalled Firestone tires came back to the dealers, said spokeswoman Jill Bratina at the company's Nashville headquarters. Bridgestone/Firestone couldn't provide any detailed figures on the disposition of those tires, but said they were ground into crumb rubber to surface roads, were made into molded products, were used in construction or were burned.
After the August recall, Dan Swanson, general manager of First Nation Recovery Inc., a Riverside County tire recycling plant that makes crumb rubber ground finer than sugar, said he got a call directly from Bridgestone/Firestone.
"They wanted to know how many we could take and the cost to them for our taking them. We came to an agreement, and they brought them to us," Swanson said. The plant used up hundreds of thousands of Firestone tires.
The two-year-old First Nation plant, owned by the Cabazon band of Mission Indians in Mecca (Riverside County), exemplifies the growth of the scrap tire industry. Last year, it produced 13 million pounds of crumb rubber. This year, it expects to make 30 million pounds.
Granite Construction Co., International Servicing Systems, FNF and other companies that build rubberized roads in several states buy 90 percent of First Nation's crumb rubber. The other 10 percent goes into molded products, including construction materials.
California Department of Transportation spokesman Dennis Trujillo said the department is "very enthusiastic" about the rubberized asphalt concrete roads that crisscross the state. "This is one of many good materials that we have to extend the life of the highway system for an additional 20 years."
Caltrans started experimenting with crumb rubber in roads nearly 25 years ago. Though the cost is twice as high as regular asphalt concrete roads, the engineers found rubberized roads did the job at half the thickness. Besides using up scrap tires, they make a durable, flexible road that resists cracking and gives a quieter ride, Trujillo said. Currently, Caltrans is using half a million tires in a four-lane 25-mile project on Interstate 880 in the East Bay.
Caltrans' use jumped from 500,000 tires in 1995 to 2.8 million in 2000, but the state is still struggling to boost recycling of its tire load.
Of the 34.8 million scrap tires in California last year -- the 31.6 million discarded tires, plus 3.2 million imported by companies that get paid to take them for fuel -- about 11 million were used in roads, molded products and construction materials. Ten million went to a Waste Management landfill in a gravel pit in Azusa in Los Angeles County, 5.1 million were used to produce energy at cement and cogeneration plants, 3.6 million were reused by other drivers, 2.4 million were retread and 1.9 million were exported to Mexico for use there.
Nationwide, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is watching the latest recall. "The challenge is ensuring that these recalled tires are collected and managed properly and don't end up in stockpiles," said Paul Ruesch, environmental engineer in the Chicago office. "They breed mosquitoes 100 times faster than in the normal environment. And the question is no longer if a tire scrap stockpile will end up on fire -- but when."
Number of scrap tires generated: 273 million Approximate weight of these scrap tires: 3.6 million tons Percentage of total solid wastes generated: 1.8 percent Number of scrap tires in stockpiles: 300 million Number of processing facilities for scrap tires: 498 Number of scrap tires going to a market: 203 million Number used for fuel: 125 million Number used in civil engineering applications: 30 million Number exported: 15 million Number processed into ground rubber: 18 million Number punched/stamped into new products: 8 million Number used in agriculture and miscellaneous applications: 7 million Number used in a melting process: 0
Source: Rubber Manufacturers Association
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