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November 19, 2009

NY statewide tire dump cleanup nears completion

By MARY ESCH

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Five years after the state started a cleanup program funded by a fee on new tires, 102 of New York's 146 tire dumps are gone, state Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Pete Grannis said Thursday.

There were an estimated 34 million tires in illegal dumps across New York in 2004, Grannis said, posing an environmental and public health threat. Since then, he said, 27 million tires have been removed, including more than 16 million from the two largest sites.

Most of the old tires were chipped up for use in landfill and highway construction. Others were ground into crumb rubber used for athletic fields, playgrounds, molded traffic barriers and industrial mats.

Val Washington, assistant DEC commissioner, said the state is on target to complete the rest of the cleanups in 2010.

Grannis said 12 of the 17 largest dumps have been completely cleared of tires. At the largest dump, the Fortino site in the Oswego County town of West Monroe, 11.4 million tires were chipped and removed. At the second-largest site, Mohawk Tire in the Saratoga County town of Waterford, 5 million tires were removed. Both of those cleanups were completed in recent weeks.

"It took decades to fill these dumps in communities in all corners of the state," Grannis said in a statement. "But we have achieved a remarkable cleanup in a relatively short time."

Tire piles serve as breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes and pose a risk of fires that are difficult to put out and cause significant air and water pollution from thick smoke and oily runoff.

Between 1989 and 2004, there were more than 20 tire fires in the state involving millions of waste tires. At the 39-acre Saratoga County site, 25 miles north of Albany, a fire sparked by a downed power line in 2002 burned millions of tires and took firefighters more than a week to extinguish.

Money for the cleanups came from a recycling fee of $2.50 on every new tire sold in New York. The fee brought in $153 million as of the end of September, and $83 million of that was spent on cleanups, DEC spokesman Yancey Roy said.

The Empire State Development Corp. got about $8 million of the money to support new tire recycling operations and to market the ground-up rubber, and the Department of Transportation received about $4 million for demonstration projects using chipped or ground tires, Washington said.

A percentage of the money also goes into the state's general fund.

Of the 102 completed sites, 86 were cleaned up privately through DEC enforcement actions, Washington said.

New Yorkers generate more than 20 million used tires a year, Washington said. Many are shredded for use as tire-derived fuel. The second-largest use is for ground rubber, which is the highest-value product from tire recycling. The rest are chopped and used as a substitute for stone aggregate in landfills and roads. A small percentage are used for retreads.

The Rubber Manufacturers Association estimates there were 1 billion tires in dumps nationwide in 1994. By 2007, the number had been reduced to 138 million.

"It's one of the great success stories out there" in environmental cleanup, said Michael Blumenthal, vice president of the association. Reducing the number of remaining tires in dumps to less than 50 million is the association's goal, he said. Forty states report having no tires left in dumps, he said.

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