Costly trash

By Published by The Editorial Board

Published: July 14, 2008

Littering always comes with a cost, but the occasional fast-food wrapper has nothing on illegally dumped tires.

Their shape traps and holds water, creating a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes. Tire fires are difficult and expensive to control and extinguish. Landowners are responsible for cleaning up the tires illegally dumped by others.

“Tire dumping statewide is increasing,” said Rick Drazenovich, Danville’s director of public works. “We clean these up constantly, but we get hundreds of tires a month. Our litter crews find them in ones and twos and sometimes whole piles.”

A 2,000-tire dump along the Danville Expressway was found in January. It cost $7,434 to clean up. But that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what the state has had to spend to fix this problem.

Old, worn-out tires were once good candidates for recapping, a process that bonded a new tread onto an old tire. But with the collapse of that business and the cost of disposal, more and more tires were dumped.

The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality reports on its Web site that because tires had to be cut apart before they could be buried in a landfill, they were used for erosion control or placed in “temporary storage” — and that was legal in our state until 1988.

But what really caught Richmond’s attention was a massive tire fire in Roanoke County in 2002. More than 3 million tires burned. In response, the General Assembly increased the tire recycling fee from 50 cents to $1 to fund tire pile clean-ups around the state.

While millions of tires have been pulled from the those piles, new tire piles have been discovered, some tire dumps were much larger than estimated and the cost of doing the work has increased.

In response to those problems, the General Assembly in 2006 extended the $1 fee for another two years (it reverted back to 50 cents on June 30). But Virginia still has a lot of tire piles out there to clean up.

Illegal tire dumps aren’t just a local nuisance, they’re a problem that has cost Virginia’s taxpayers millions in clean-up costs. Tire piles can’t be left by the side of the road, and when they’re discovered, we all have to pay the price to remove them.