Old Tires You Tried to Recycle Come Back as Smog
When recycling goes awry: a case study.
STOCKTON, California — Inside a dark, high-ceilinged machine shop, Mark Hope leans over a motionless conveyor belt, picking through the black scraps. He finds what he’s looking for and holds it up — a web of silver wires sandwiched between two layers of black rubber. “There’s a lot of metal in tires,” he says. “Ten, fifteen percent.” The wire is tough on the equipment, he says. He points up to the shredder, a grimy box with one conveyor to drop tires into the hopper on the top and another conveyor to carry the shredded tires away. The shears are inside the box. “We have to change these out all the time,” he says. They’re constantly going dull from the wire.
Every morning, a fleet of trucks leaves the yard of Hope’s business, Waste Recovery West, on the outskirts of Stockton to collect fodder for its shredder. They spread out, some going west through the Bay Area, some north a bit past Sacramento, others south as far as Bakersfield. Each returns loaded with hundreds of old tires.
Every year, California drivers generate more than 40 million used tires. Most of them are too beat up to be returned to the road, and until the early 1990s, two-thirds went to landfills, taking up space and costing municipalities money. Others were burned for fuel, and a small portion were recycled. Since then, the state government has spent millions, going to great lengths to keep those tires out of the dump. Besides their utility as fuel, scrap tires can be shredded and turned into artificial turf, or applied as landfill cover to keep other trash from blowing or washing away, but the government prefers that they be recycled, turned into something new and useful. The state has been the catalyst getting the tire recycling businesses up and running, and developing markets for the recycled tire products those businesses make possible.
That went well for a while — the portion of California’s scrap tires winding up in landfills fell from about 65 percent in 1990 to just 26 percent in 2001 — until an increase in the prices of Australian coal and Southeast Asian natural rubber threw California’s tire recycling system for a loop. Soon after, Hope started getting calls. The callers were Chinese, or Vietnamese. They were looking for tires. Sometimes they’d call three, four times a week, he says. They had machines to crush the tires down into compact bales and started shipping millions of them to Asia, where they were now a cheaper option than coal for burning in factory furnaces. Suddenly, tire recyclers across the state were sitting idle as the elaborate program the state had kick-started no longer had the material to feed the system. “These balers came along and tossed it all to the wind,” Hope says.
It’s an apt metaphor: Numerous studies have shown that pollution from China makes it across the Pacific Ocean, fouling California air. A 2015 study by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, published in Nature Geoscience, found that although the Western United States greatly reduced its pollutant emissions between 2005 and 2010, air quality remained the same because of a simultaneous increase in emissions in China. Some of those tires were likely making it back to Hope’s shop — as smog.
Sixty years ago, many worn-out tires were tossed on heaps. Like the landfills they competed with, the owners of these stockpiles charged a fee to accept the tires, then simply threw them on the pile. By the end of the 1980s, when California’s population had grown 150 percent from the 1950s and its car culture was triumphant, the state’s waste management board estimated that more than 45 million tires were stockpiled across the state.
RELATED: TakePart’s “Shrink Your Waste” Series Has Tips on How to Be a Conscious Consumer
During the 1980s, a number of large tire piles in other states caught fire (providing writers of The Simpsons with a running gag). It’s not easy for tires to ignite, but once they do, they burn fantastically — a tire has a heating value roughly the same as that of good-quality coal. In 1983, seven million tires caught fire in Mountain Falls, Virginia, and burned for nine months. Concerned about the environmental and economic threats these stockpiles posed, California lawmakers passed the California Tire Recycling Act in 1989. The act set up a system to track the movement of tires around the state. A business hauling or storing tires needed to have a permit, and to keep track of how many tires it had. Second, the California Integrated Waste Management Board, the agency the state set up to handle recycling, started pushing people to come up with ways to reuse old tires and worked to develop markets for those uses. To help with the costs, it gave out grants.