King of the mountain— of tires
Say “Colorado” to most Americans and the term evokes visions of pristine landscapes of majestic, snow-capped mountains and other natural vistas that are symbols of ecological purity. But lurking beneath the shadows of the Colorado Rockies is a lesser-known and decidedly non-pristine mountain range comprised of millions of waste tires.
Colorado is home to the largest stockpiles ofwaste tires in the nation. Awhopping 60 million-plus tires are contained in twomammoth piles, accounting for more than half of stockpiledwaste tires in the entire country. Overall, theU.S. has approximately 100 million scrap tires, which is a dramatic reduction from a high of 1 billion tires back in 1990. Back then, only 11 percent of waste tireswere reused in an end use market, but today about 85 percent ofwaste tires are reused in a variety of applications including fuel, road construction, artificial turf fields and yard mulch.
Colorado has been lucky that its two mammoth tire dumps— 31 million tires just north of Hudson and nearly 27 million tires just south of Colorado Springs— haven’t yet caught fire and triggered an environmentally calamity. A catastrophic tire fire in one of those piles would be an environmental cleanup calamity costing many times more to remediate than cleaning up the piles now.
How has Colorado, a state that is a symbol of environmental beauty, become the nation’s leading dumping ground for scrap tires? Quite simply, it’s due to a waste tire program that permits tires to be landfilled and fails to incentivize newer, highvalue end-use markets for waste tires.
The Rubber Manufacturers Association, the national trade organization for tire manufacturers in the U.S., has worked across the nation to work with policymakers and other stakeholders to enact effective waste legislation and regulations. I have spent a great deal of time working with Colorado lawmakers to address the state’s serious problem.
In 2013, the Colorado Waste Tire Advisory Committee, a body created by the legislature to study and advise the state on necessary improvements to Colorado’s waste tire management system, issued a comprehensive report with recommendations on how to incentivize better and higher-value end use markets for Colorado waste tires.
As a result of the study, Colorado is on the brink of making progress toward a better state waste tiremanagement program. Bipartisan legislation sponsored by Reps. Max Tyler, D-Lakewood, and Don Coram, RMontrose, will phase out the tiremonofills, work toward cleaning up these massive eyesores and eventually phase out the expensive, inefficient taxpayer subsidy payments. Additionally, House Bill 1352 cuts the waste tire fee more than half from $1.50 to 55 cents per tire.
Colorado’s waste tire program will work best if the state has economically viable and self-sustaining enduse markets. Currently, Colorado’s end-use markets are limited largely to tire-derived fuel (TDF) used by cement kilns. While TDF is a viable, beneficial market important to the overall success of a waste tire program, exploration of higher-value end uses such as rubber modified asphalt, tire-derived aggregate, crumb rubber for athletic fields and playground cover or molded products, is a must to successfully recycle and reuse waste tires.