The Smallest State in the Union has no ready solution to its waste tyres, according to an article in ecoRI, by Don D@ambrosio
D’Ambrosio writes about the once infamous Davis Tire Pile, which was reported to be the resting place of some 6 million end of life tyres. It was the result of hoarding for some future gold mine the world is still waiting for to come out of waste tyres.
However, rather than being a goldmine, the stockpile led to a $32 million cleanup required by the Environmental Protection Agency.
To help pay for the clean-up, the EPA reached a settlement with 54 companies, many of them large corporations, which had disposed of hazardous waste on the site.
Mark Dennen, a supervising environmental scientist in the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, points to the Davis tyre pile as a prime example of the scale of the problem presented by the 280 million tyres that are discarded in the United States every year. Dennen says; “There’s a lot of illegal dumping of tyres, because they’re hard to get rid of; you can’t put them in the trash.”
The driving force behind illegal dumping are the fees charged to dispose of tyres, which are typically between $3 and $5 for a car tyre and more for bigger truck tyres, according to Shannon Choquette, an environmental analyst with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.
“Tires are a difficult material to manage for a variety of reasons,” Choquette said. “The sheer amount of scrap tyres created make the material a challenge to keep up with.”
The risk of fire was enough to keep firefighters in Smithfield on edge for years, because every firefighter knows tyre fires are monsters.
“There have been numerous fires when it burns so hot firefighters can’t put it out because water will evaporate before it gets there,” Dennen said. “Tires have a higher BTU than coal, with very toxic emissions. They create liquids, too, that get into the aquifer.”
It’s for these reasons, Dennen said, that DEM created a regulation requiring a permit for storing more than 100 tyres.
D’Ambrosio comes to the reality of the challenge. The problem, he writes, is the fact there are limited markets for recycling them. The most common use is as tire-derived fuel, or TDF, but that has obvious drawbacks in terms of generating greenhouse gases, both when the tires are burned for energy and when they are transported to one of the few facilities set up to handle them. The Product Stewardship Institute says 32 per cent of discarded tyres in the USA, are burned as tyre-derived fuel.
“In the Northeast, many states rely heavily on tyre-derived fuel, often transported long distances since the facility in Sterling, Conn., closed down,” said Shaina Cohen, program manager for hazardous waste and waste site cleanup for the Northeast Waste Management Officials’ Association. “Other recycling options are either limited in capacity or not economically viable at scale. When disposal options shrink or costs rise, states often see increased stockpiling and illegal dumping.”
Dennen noted that a lot of controversy swirled around the Sterling facility when it was open, as Connecticut legislators tried to ban tires from Rhode Island from going to Sterling.
In the end it was probably economics that brought down the Sterling facility, according to Dennen.
“There are very significant costs in meeting air quality requirements. If you look regionally, nobody has built a new incinerator in the past 20 or 30 years, and all these waste-to-energy facilities are getting old, reaching the end of life, but nobody is proposing to build new ones. That tells me the economics aren’t there.”
There are also environmental concerns regarding other uses of scrap tyres, such as grinding them down for use as lightweight fill or drainage material, or even to make athletic fields. This last use is particularly controversial.
“With regard to athletic fields made from ground tyre rubber, the pushback is largely driven by uncertainty around potential exposure to chemicals present in tyres,” Cohen said. “While federal and state studies have examined these materials, public concern has persisted — particularly around frequent contact by children and athletes.”
Asked if there were any emerging technologies to deal with tyres, Cohen said: “Emerging technologies such as pyrolysis and other recycling approaches are being explored, but most are still limited in scale and not yet a regional solution.”
Dennen, however, remains sceptical, writes D’Ambrosio; “People see (tyre pyrolysis) as the next big thing, but when you look at pyrolysis facilities you can’t find one that operates economically for a long period of time,” he said. “I haven’t seen any work on an industrial scale in the Northeast.”
Source: This story was originally published by ecoRI News (ecoRI.org).
