| Why Recycle? |
Why recycle scrap tires?
Tire pile fires have been an even greater environmental problem. Tire pile fires can burn for months, sending up an acrid black plume that can be seen for dozens of miles. That plume contains toxic chemicals and air pollutants, just as toxic chemicals are released into surrounding water supplies by oily runoff from tire fires. Fighting a tire pile fire is not only futile in some cases, it can actually make the pollution problem worse.
Tires are often tied together and tossed in the ocean not as waste, but to create artificial reefs as habitat for game fish for recreational anglers. Hurricane Bonnie tore up one such reef in 1998 and scattered the remains on beach at Pine Knoll Shores, NC. (Philadelphia Inquirer August 29, 1998)
Scrap tires were commonly recycled until the 1960s, when cheap foreign oil and difficulty shredding steel-belted tires shifted the short-term economic benefits squarely on the side of tire disposal.
But the practice has had negative consequences for human and environmental health, increasing pollution and energy consumption and wasting finite resources like oil and steel. Tire recycling is just part of a range of efforts that can be taken by society, industry and individuals to reduce problems of tire waste.
Those consequences have long been seen as "negative" from an environmentalist perspective, but economics also supports recycling and energy recovery — the use of scrap tire rubber as fuel — as beneficial components of a scrap tire management program. Using recycled tire rubber can be less expensive than making new rubber for some products. Using recycled rubber to make products like parking lot wheel stops, signs bases and other molded products can increase safety and reduce maintenance costs compared to using some traditional materials.
Scrap tire recycling and other means to squeeze more use out of the rubber, steel and energy that goes into tire production; have increased dramatically in the past decade.
There are several ways to "recycle" scrap tires, but most listings of the most environmentally and economically sound ways of managing them begin with preventing tire waste in the first place.
