Case studies of challenging scrap tire cleanup efforts throughout the country were the topic for discussion at the TIA World Tire Expo’s Scrap Tire Cleanup Forum.
Allan Lassiter with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality provided details about the Lee Farm tire pile cleanup effort in Caroline County, Va., which involved removing tires from a deep, steep ravine. The project recovered 605,000 PTEs (passenger tire equivalents) at a total cost of nearly $850,000, Lassiter said.
The project was plagued by difficulties, including an overturned crane that had to be rescued by a second crane.
Lassiter said that had the state known then what it knows now, he would have opted to bring in dirt and fill the ravine in properly rather than remove the tires.
Mark Hope of Tire Disposal & Recycling Inc., Portland, Ore., outlined abatement efforts in the Northwest. According to his presentation, after the sunset of the Oregon tire tax in the early 1990s, the state’s enforcement infrastructure has successfully prevented the formation of new tire stockpiles; however in Washington and Idaho, whose tire taxes expired in the mid-1990s, the enforcement infrastructures have proven inadequate to prevent new stockpiles.
Hope then provided details about the Stellar tire pile cleanup in Salem, Ore., which was the site of an abandoned tire processing site located in an industrial park. He said the DEQ negotiated an access agreement with the property owner and requested a fixed-basis bid in which 90 percent of the recovered tires would be landfilled and 10 percent would be processed into TDF.
Some of the issues encountered on the site included hidden whole tires among the shreds, problems with wet weather and security at the site, Hope said.
The second case study Hope presented was of the Cross-O site in Riggins, Idaho. While the site was in a remote location, he said it received some public attention in light of its proximity to a state highway and because the responsibly party created a network of legacy sites prior to the tire tax program.
Hope said the issues associated with the Cross-O project included the recovery cost of $1.44 per tire, the winter weather, the 480-mile distance to the TDF processor and the per diem labor used at the site.
Tire Disposal and Recycling Inc. also handled cleanup services at the Erickson pile in Rochester, Wash. Hope said the legacy site contained nearly 289,200 PTEs and had received public attention because of an earlier fire, its proximity to Interstate 5 and the development of neighboring property.
Finally, Hope discussed the Sears Point project in Sonoma, Calif., which he described as “a dream come true” from a contractor’s standpoint because it was not a government project.
Sears Point was considered a legacy site and the tires were discovered during a $40 million expansion of a NASCAR raceway. Tire Disposal and Recycling removed 500,000 PTEs from the site, with nearly 30 percent being dirt contamination, Hope said. The project took four months to complete and made use of a track hoe and live floor and demo trailers.
Dave Quarterson of Liberty Tire Services outlined his company’s efforts to cleanup the McMaster pile at the site of a former Ohio stripe mine in which a number of tires were dumped in a lake. He said Liberty began the project by clearing the slope and terracing the site.
Liberty processed many of the tires on site using equipment from Barclay Roto-Shred Inc. of Stockton, Calif. Quarterson said the project ran from December of 2003 through June of ’04. F
Finally Bob Lafarge of the Ohio EPA provided information on the Kirby Tire Cleanup in Sycamore, Ohio. An estimated 25 million tires were on the 110-acre site, he said, with some piles towering to 40 feet high, 200 feet wide and 1,000 feet long.
The state tire removal contract for the Kirby site began July 1, 1999. Arson at the site in August of the same year involved 5 to 7 million tires, Lafarge said. Smoke from the fire drifted over Columbus, 60 miles Southeast of the Kirby site. To stop the fire from spreading, layers of sand and clay were used to cover the burning piles.
Oil seeped from the buried fire residual piles. Sump pumps in fire residual piles reduced, but did not eliminate the problem, Lafarge said.
According to Lafarge, $11.1 million has been spent to date to remove 15 million tires from the site.
In addition to these case studies, the EPA’s pending “Scrap Tire Cleanup Guidebook,” to be released in mid-2005, was previewed at the session. The EPA’s Mapping Project presented attendees with information that could help their companies participate in abatement work.
More information on both these EPA projects is available online at www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/tires/index.htm.
The TIA World Tire Expo was April 20-22 at the Kentucky International Convention Center in Louisville.