Tire Recycling Plant Rejected

For Izzy Oren, who endures the trucks and the dust and the dead starlings falling from the sky, the proposed tire-melting project was simply the last straw.

But on Wednesday (March 10^th), he savored a victory when the Deschutes, Ore., County Commission rescinded a lease that had been offered to a California company to operate a tire-recycling project at Knott Landfill.

"There is no evidence that thing is safe" said Oren, 57, who has lived south of the landfill since 1989.

Bowing to intense neighborhood pressure, commissioners Tom DeWolf and Mike Daly voted to rescind the one-year lease, which had been offered to Integrated Resource Recovery of Mill Valley, Calif. Commissioner Dennis Luke voted for the lease. DeWolf said he proposed the move after learning that the lease had not been signed.

He said the county should try to answer neighborhood questions about the environmental impacts of the project.

Then the issue of the lease should be revisited at a later date, he said.

"There's a lot of concern out there and a lot of questions that have been asked," DeWolf said.

Commissioner Luke disagreed. He said the process, called tire pyrolysis, is safe. Months of work and research involving the state Department of Environmental Quality and county landfill officials convinced him the project should go forward.

"We didn't just jump of a cliff here, we did a lot of work," Luke said.

A spokesman for the California company said backers of the project are moving forward despite the lease setback.

A public hearing scheduled by the Department of Environmental Quality for April 5 will go on as scheduled despite the county decision, said Don Bramhall, a natural resource specialist with DEQ's solid waste program.

The hearing is being held to discuss amendments to Deschutes County's solid waste disposal permit.

The county is asking the state to allow for the storage of more tires than are currently permitted.

Luke defended the county's previous decision to expand the landfill. The facility, which had been scheduled to close in 2009, will now be open until 2029.

Expanding the landfill saved the county millions of dollars in potential transportation costs, Luke said.