Pennsylvania Awards Money for Tire Cleanup

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has awarded $1.3 million to the Recycling Environmental Group and Carbon Services Corp. to fund projects that will help clean up the state’s largest waste tire pile and create markets for the use of more than an estimated six million tires at a dump site in Greenwood Township, Columbia County.

The General Assembly appropriated $6.8 million in the 2004-05 budget to DEP for the cleanup of scrap tires, including $2 million secured by the local state senator and representative specifically for work at the Starr Tire Pile. That funding is essential to DEP’s effort to clean up the site and make responsible generators remove their waste tires, including the creation of the Starr Waste Tire Reuse Grant Program.

DEP awarded two grants totaling $1.3 million to the Recycling Environmental Group and Carbon Services Corp. to remove tires from the site. The grants are part of the Starr Waste Tire Reuse Grant Program, which was launched last January. DEP received 10 applications. These are the first two grants to be awarded.

The Recycling Environmental Group from Bloomsburg received a $999,948 grant for a 12-month project that will process about 1 million tires into two- to four-inch shreds. The shreds will be processed further into crumb rubber at the company’s Bloomsburg facility, which will use the rubber to produce other usable and marketable products.

Carbon Services Corp., located in Lehighton, received $299,970 to remove about 2,000 large, hard-to-dispose-of tires from the site. The tires, which are not suitable for conventional processing because each one can weigh more than half a ton, will be prepped in Philadelphia and deployed as a new reef habitat in the Atlantic Ocean.

DEP finalized terms of a legal agreement with Max and Martha Starr in March 2004 to clean up more than 6 million tires that accumulated at the property in the mid-1980s. Aside from a $400,000 civil penalty for failing to remove waste tires from their property, the Starrs also had to relinquish operational control of the pile to DEP but maintain liability insurance.

DEP already has contacted more than 40 businesses that sent tires to the property to request removal. Twenty-one tire generators have refused to remove waste tires taken from their businesses years ago to the Starr tire pile. On January 26, DEP filed a Complaint In Equity in Columbia County Court to require each generator to remove its share of waste tires.

Seven of the 21 generators have removed a total of 24,717 tires from the site and DEP’s Northcentral Regional Office’s Waste Management Program is negotiating agreements with three additional tire generators. The action could bring a civil penalty of $100 per day against any generator who fails to comply with the court’s order.