NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

Vic sent me an e-mail the other day with a suggestion for a column topic — used tires and crumb rubber. Yes, we communicate by e-mail even though we have adjacent offices. I think that’s one of the secrets of our happy marriage. We rarely communicate face to face.

I fired a sensitive, thoughtful e-mail back to him, writing something like, “How in the (hot place where the devil lives) am I supposed to make crumb rubber interesting?”

He lovingly wrote back, “That’s your problem.”

See why we never talk to each other? If we had actual conversations, we probably would have divorced long ago. E-mail has saved our marriage.

Still not wanting to write about tires, I e-mailed him again, asking why “we” should do a column on tires.

Vic e-mailed back that the reason he wanted “us” to write about used tires and crumb rubber was that the city of Huntington Beach is repaving Garfield Avenue, and that they plan to use asphalt containing shredded rubber from scrap auto tires.

Ah, so that’s what crumb rubber is — shredded tires. He had piqued my interest, so I threw myself into researching the bouncy world of rubber.

Asphalt with crumb rubber in it is said to be higher in quality than regular asphalt. It yields a smoother ride. But the quality of the pavement is only one good reason to add rubber to asphalt. It is also a good way to get rid of old tires. Tires are actually one of America’s leading solid waste problems. According to the EPA, Americans discard more than 290 million tires a year. They can’t all get turned into re-treads. Unfortunately, many of them end up in huge piles that can catch fire.

In 1998, a grass fire ignited 7 million tires at an unlicensed dump in Tracy. It took more than two years to extinguish the flames. Smoke rose 6,000 feet into the sky, filling the atmosphere with toxics. It was America’s longest burning tire fire.

In 1999, in Westly lightning struck another illegal tire dump of 7 million tires, and ignited a blaze that lasted for 34 days. Melted tires produced pyrolytic oil, which flowed into a nearby stream and ignited. It cost $20 million and took seven years to clean up that mess. Nearly 300,000 tons of contaminated soil had to be removed.

Along the Mexican-U.S. border, more than 3.5 million tires have accumulated in illegal dumps. There is hope for cleanup of that problem. In June 2008, California was a signatory with federal and other state agencies from the U.S. and Mexico in a treaty that will address this border issue.

Another bad thing about tire dumps is that no matter which way a tire lies, it’s going to hold water. And mosquitoes can breed in that water. So tire dumps become mosquito breeding grounds. It would be good to find things to do with tires other than dump them.

The good news is that society is making progress in reusing, recycling or recovering used tires. In 1990, a mere 11% of tires were reused, but in 2001, 78% were reused in some way. However, recycling seems to be leveling off. In 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available, the rate of reuse was 82%, only a slight improvement from four years earlier.

Some tires, in the form of crumb rubber, can be burned for fuel in cement kilns, paper and pulp mills and boilers — but the smoke they produce is just terrible. About 52% of scrap tires are used in this way as fuel.

About 16% of tires are recycled in the form of shreds for civil engineering projects such as septic tank leach fields and landfill construction. Other uses for crumb rubber are in playground surfaces, riding arenas and athletic fields, as well as an addition to asphalt roads. This accounts for 12% of scrap tires.

Interestingly, crumb rubber is made by the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians in a plant in Mecca, near Indio. The Native Americans opened First Nation Recovery Inc. shortly before the massive Firestone tire recall in 2000, when millions of defective tires had to be dealt with. The workers at First Nation Recovery Inc., shredded the tires and used magnets to pull out the steel belts. The result was fine crumbs that could be used in a number of ways. Those were profitable days, as they were paid to take the tires, and then they sold the crumb rubber.

But by 2003, the bottom had dropped out of the market. Subsidized crumb rubber from Canada made the locally produced product un-competitive. Somehow First Nation Recovery Inc., survived, and they still produce about 1.5 million pounds of crumb rubber a month. Using shredded rubber in street asphalt is still a great way to recycle at least some of this enormous amount of material. The Garfield Avenue repaving project alone is expected to consume something like 30,000 scrap tires.

But before we clap ourselves on the back, let’s think again about the scale of the problem. A city the size of Huntington Beach (200,000 people) probably generates about 150,000 scrap tires per year, five times as much as will be used in the Garfield project. In other words, even with this good project, we are producing tire trash at a far higher rate than we are recycling it locally.

Well, tires and crumb rubber turned out to be more interesting than I thought it would be. I should thank Vic for bringing this topic to my attention. Nah, I’ll just send him an e-mail.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.