The 5,000 tires that we recycled this year bring us up to 11,000 to date, in three years of free tire recycling days.  We’re still on the upswing, seeing more tires each year! 

One fun new twist this year was that we had so many young people volunteering.  Young adults, teens, and fairly small kids all pitched in.  The highest hope is for the next generation to be primed to be serious about recycling – and also to realize in a hands-on visceral way, that staggering quantities of products that are being produced and junked as a daily occurrence that we are so casual about.

Why do we get so fired up about our Tire Day?  Everybody knows that tires left lying about become breeding grounds for mosquitoes – this is the obvious, visible health threat.  However, the chemicals that are found in the tires are even worse than the mosquitoes.

Tires are a complex cocktail of synthetic/natural rubbers, heavy metals (like zinc and copper), carcinogens like benzene or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and other chemical additives.  All of these are used to enhance the performance and the durability of the tires – but they are not without consequences.

Tire dust from tire wear on the road is a major, largely unregulated pollutant. It poses significant threats to both human health and aquatic ecosystems. Tire particles are exceptionally small (often under 10 microns). Because of this, they can easily bypass the body’s natural defenses, like the skin barrier, and enter the lungs. They can even pass into the bloodstream and cross the blood-brain barrier. Emerging research indicates that inhaling these particles can lead to elevated oxidative stress and may contribute to developmental, reproductive, respiratory, and cardiovascular issues.  Tire dust accounts for a massive share of global microplastic pollution in our oceans and waterways. Heavier particles settle into the soil and wash off into rivers during storms. A preservative called 6PPD is used to keep tires from cracking. When it reacts with the air, it turns into 6PPD-quinone, which is highly toxic to certain aquatic life. It has been shown to cause mass mortality in fish like the Pacific Northwest Coho salmon. Heavy metals that leach out from the rubber into urban runoff can impair the growth of plants and disrupt fragile local water ecosystems.

Tires left to sit in backyards or in the woods contain the same chemical mixture, but now the concern is not the dust – it’s the leaching of the chemicals into the soil and water, over time, as they degrade through exposure to the sun and the rain.  Leached tire chemicals can contaminate ground water, surface water, and soils, harming the entire web of life that relies on clean water and clean soil – including humans – just the same as the tire dust does, but now it’s in our wells, aquifers, and the soils that we grow our food in.

When we have created such a toxic cocktail that even our nature-given bodies and ecosystems can’t rally a defense, it’s definitely past time to put some of our attention and effort toward the problem.  While we can’t remove tires from the world yet, we can remove the extras that are sitting around and degrading into our environment!  

FYI, this year, we are excited to be having the Tire Day tires hauled away by Monkey Tire & Disposal, from Roseburg, that will take the tires to Roseburg and process them for recycling right there.  First he strips out the metal, and he sells that to a recycler.  Then he shreds the rubber and sells that, too: recyclers use it to make asphalt for roads, new tires, and other products.  Since we know that tires are full of toxics, and they already leave the toxics behind on the roads, it seems like a good idea to reuse the recycled tires in new road surface, and new tires.  For the record, the use of tire crumbles in playground and athletic field surfaces has declined sharply in recent years, as science has caught up to the fact that they are toxic for kids (and adults) to play in or on.  Either way: the tires we collect are not going to the landfill!  They are headed for their next productive life, elsewhere.

The IV News covered the Tire Day this year; check out the article and photos, here!