The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection announced the successful cleanup of more than 190,000 tires from nuisance tire piles in McKean County.
“Over the past eight months, DEP has worked with local governments and community volunteers to address multiple tire piles that had accumulated over the years in McKean County,” said Kelly Burch, the DEP’s regional director. “This partnership has resulted in a truly amazing accomplishment. All McKean County tire piles that had been on Pennsylvania’s cleanup Priority List have been removed, with waste tires now being put to new use.”
Back in January under a DEP contract, Recycling Environmental Group, a company specializing in tire remediation, brought a tire shredder to Mace Recycling Facility in Foster Township. This was the site of a permitted waste tire transfer/processing operation where more than 150,000 tires had accumulated. The owner did not have the funds to remove the tires and was unable to comply with the terms of his permit.
In a unique cooperative effort, DEP joined with Foster Township, McKean County Solid Waste Authority and the property owner in an agreement that allowed the township to acquire the land for free for park development. In exchange, the township took responsibility for removing the tires. The McKean County Solid Waste Authority accepted the shredded tires for construction purposes at its landfill.
Because the shredder was in the region, DEP began working with other townships and the McKean County Chapter of PACleanways to address other tire piles in the area. Volunteers from PACleanways hand-loaded the tires onto township trucks with the tires being transported to the shredder at the Mace property. Through this effort, 25,000 tires were removed at the Bryner Tire Pile in Bradford Township and 3,000 tires were removed from Barnes Farm in Ceres Township.
Under a third arrangement, some of the tires at the Mace Facility were sidewalls from truck tires that were a problem for the shredder to process. The Crawford County Penn State Agricultural Extension Office helped arrange for local farmers to use the sidewalls instead of whole tires that farmers were using as silage cover hold-downs. More than 3,600 whole tires were collected from various farmers under this arrangement, with the collected tires shredded and reused rather than being sent to the landfill for disposal.
Once all of these tires were processed, the shredder was relocated to the Tompkins Tire Pile in Keating Township, where approximately 13,000 tires are being shredded as the final project for the year in northwestern Pennsylvania.
The Solid Waste Abatement Fund (SWAF) funded the tire shredder. It shreds the tires into two- to three-inch squares where they can be beneficially reused in various construction activities, such as pipe bedding and landfill construction.
“Removing tire piles has substantial payoffs to both public health and the environment,” Burch said. “With tens of thousands of waste tires removed, potential threats to the ecosystem are gone. Fewer waste tires also mean reduced breeding grounds for mosquitoes and other pests.”