Reward Offered for Info About Discarded Tires
The Douglasville Police Department is offering a $1,000 reward leading to the arrest of the person or persons responsible for dumping an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 tires on property located off Blairs Bridge Road within city limits.
“The police department considers this to be a serious crime,” said Police Chief Chris Womack. “We very much want to catch the person or people and hold them responsible for the mess they created.”
The eyesore is not far from Sweetwater Creek.
An anonymous tipper alerted the Sentinel to the thousands of tires he estimated had been disposed there. He said he had complained to the city to no avail.
On Wednesday, there were thousands of tires of various sizes on both sides of the dirt road, which is horseshoe-shaped, with one way in and out. More tires were heaped in piles in areas off the road on the front part of the property and a larger heap where the road ends.
A day after heavy rains, tire tracks on the unmarked road were wet and muddy water covered one side of the road.
Soggy carpet, broken furniture, an Orange Crush bottle half-filled with drink, plastic trays, wood — even women’s boots and shoes — were strewn across the landscape. A solitary strand of tinsel dangled from a small tree.
It is unclear for what purpose the property was once used — if any — but a metal gate, hanging off its hinges, did not keep intruders in or out.
Womack, who often stops people who throw cigarette butts from vehicle windows, was outraged. If cigarette butts take between seven to 10 years to deteriorate, what about tires, he asked.
The tipper also worried about the environmental impact of the tires, trash and debris being situated so close to the creek,
Their concern is justifiable to some degree, according to Green Living Tips, a free online newsletter that addressed the issue.
Rubber tires are made from a mixture of rubber and other chemicals including black carbon and sulfur, according to ehow.com. While recyclable, they are among the largest and most problematic sources of waste, it said.
But more than 90 percent of all tires are made from synthetics and have proved to be an environmental headache, the Green Living Tips newspaper cited, estimating that about 300 million tires in the U.S. are scrapped or dumped each year.
“Tires tend to be dumped in huge piles. If these piles should be set alight, the smoke is an extraordinarily toxic cocktail and the runoff from melted residue can contaminate groundwater,” Michael Bloch wrote in the newsletter. “Tires left sitting around in the open also collect rainwater and become perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes.”
But how does one dispose of old tires, short of creating a dumping ground?
The Georgia Department of Natural Resources in the early 1990s created a Scrap Tire Program in an effort to clean up and recycle the nearly 12 million tires housed in illegal stockpiles throughout the state, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It is funded by the $1 scrap tire management fee charged when consumers purchase new tires. A majority of the scrap tires are shipped to recycling facilities where they are shredded into two-inch by two-inch chips which are primarily used for energy-related and civil engineering applications, the EPA added.
Another report, Georgia’s Scrap Tire Management Program: An Assessment of Economic and Environmental Viability, noted that approximately 62 percent of Georgia’s scrap tire chips are sold as tire derived fuel to paper mills, about 25% are sold to building contractors for use in sewage system drainage fields, and about 13% are sold as feedstock to out-of-state producers of crumb rubber.
However, Bloch wrote that 25 percent of tires still wind up in landfills and nearly half of reclaimed tires in the U.S. are used as “Tire Derived Fuel” (TDF) and are usually burned alongside other fuels such as coal.
Recycled tires are also used as landscape rubber mulch on playgrounds.
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