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Tires Pile Up at Billings, Mont., Landfill

Posted on: Thursday, 6 October 2005, 00:00 CDT

By Linda Halstead-Acharya, Billings Gazette, Mont.

Oct. 4--Just about any morning at the Billings landfill, tires can be seen poking through the six inches of dirt dumped on the garbage the night before.

"It's like they're growing," said Barb Butler, environmental compliance coordinator at the landfill. "You can put 15 feet of dirt on a tire and within a week it'll be poking up."

Methane gas fills the tires, making them rise like balloons, she explained. It's such a problem, the landfill has purchased a special piece of equipment to pluck the tires from the surface, so they can be reburied. Eventually, she said, they'll stay down.

Last year, roughly 325 tons of spent tires were buried at the Billings landfill. Most were cut or shredded, which alleviates the problem of "sprouting." Still, tons of whole tires are thrown into the mix.

"We take tires although we hate tires," she said. "But if we didn't take them, they'd end up in a coulee someplace."

The landfill charges an additional fee for tires, $2 for passenger-size tire, and up to $17 for large equipment tires. Residents who bring in three tires or fewer pay no fee. For cut or shredded tires, it's $11.50 a ton.

One rancher south of Laurel actually puts tires into a coulee for his business, and has a license to do so. According to Butler, Tires for Reclamation, owned by Jay Craig, collects scrap tires from area dealers and covers them in coulees on his property. She said the business has been a boon for the landfill.

"When he started it, at least five years ago, the number of tires we got just dropped," she said.

There's a rule of thumb that every person generates one used tire per year, says Brad Griffin, lobbyist for the Montana Tire Dealers Association. That's closing in on one million tires annually for Montana alone.

"Every person contributes to the problem," he said, then laughed. "You can't force people to buy tire-soled sandals. There needs to be a market-based way to get rid of them."

Harry Staley, owner of Staley's Tire and Automotive outlets in Billings, tried to come up with such a solution. On a monthly basis, he takes in anywhere between 1,200 and 1,500 used tires.

He researched the idea several years ago -- even visiting a plant in California where they processed 35,000 tires per day -- and determined their best use was as a supplemental fuel for coal-fired generation plants. But he hit two obstacles.

"I found out the coal-fired plant needed to be set up for this from conception," he said. "Also, they needed an uninterrupted supply (of tires)."

The lack of supply -- Montana and Wyoming just don't generate enough tires, he said -- and the cost of transporting them to a facility were the deal-busters.

Instead, he bought a tire cutter. The cutter slices the tires into two half-circles. By breaking the circle, the tires don't trap methane gas, so they stay buried. According to Staley, the "U" shape has a secondary benefit. When tires fall into the landfill with the "U" facing upwards, he explained, they create what is referred to as a "100-year cup" that prevents substances from leaching downward. It's the next best thing to a lined landfill, he said.

"That's why I feel good about taking them to the landfill," he said.

"It's the right way. I don't have to worry about them."

But the process requires an expensive machine and someone to run it.

Charging $1.50 per passenger tire for disposal, it's not a major money-making venture.

According to Staley, dealers around town charge anywhere from $1.50 to $3 to dispose of a passenger-size tire.

The state does not charge a disposal fee, added Rick Thompson, who heads the Department of Environmental Quality's Solid Waste Section.

When the Grizzlies run onto the field at Washington Grizzly Stadium in Missoula, there's a spring in their steps. That's recycled rubber, Thompson explains.

Once tires are shredded and the steel belts are removed, the remaining rubber can be ground into a composition similar to a cushiony sand or gravel. Referred to as "crumb" rubber, it's been used for landscaping mulch, playground bedding and even Astroturf. The list goes on: railroad crossings, livestock mats and roofing shakes.

According to the EPA, highways are the largest single use for recycled rubber. In spite of adding to the initial cost, one study showed crumb rubber mixed with asphalt has a lower life-cycle cost than conventional pavement.

"And it is so quiet -- rubber on rubber," said Griffin, who has driven on a stretch of such highway going up to McDonald Pass.

Tires as a fuel supplement are another biggie. The Holcim-Trident Cement Plant northeast of Three Forks has proposed replacing a percentage of its current fuel with anywhere from 500,000 to 1.2 million waste tires each year.

"They could potentially use every tire in the state," Thompson said, acknowledging the difficulties of transportation.

The proposal is still going through the air-permitting process, he said.

One EPA study concluded that potential emissions from tire derived fuel are no worse than conventional fossil fuels, but opponents of the Three Forks facility argue otherwise. Besides, they say, other uses are much more efficient at recovering the energy contained in a tire.

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To see more of the Billings Gazette, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.billingsgazette.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, Billings Gazette, Mont.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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HCMLY,

Source: Billings Gazette, Billings, Montana

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