All the used tires in the country could be recycled into RAC and communities would save money (This is based on the miles of roads in CA, numbers of used tires generated per yr in CA, and the numbers of tires used in RAC per mile). The true story is emerging!! (This Dateline report didn't include the lobbyists from the tire burning industries such as cement plants who stand to save millions by burning tires for fuel and further polluting our air.) Let's support Senator Chafee in introducing his bill again and getting it adopted. Joyce, West Valley Citizen's Air Watch

Copyright 1998
National Broadcasting Co. Inc. DATELINE NBC (8:00 PM ET)
October 23, 1998, Friday 9:12 AM


YOU PAY THE BILL; USED TIRES MAY BE USED FOR RUBBERIZED ASPHALT, BUT PAVING INDUSTRY IS OPPOSED TO ITS USE.


BY: KEITH MORRISON


YOU PAY THE BILL


Announcer: From studio 3B in Rockefeller Center, here is Jane Pauley.

JANE PAULEY: Good evening. Tracy, California, just outside Sacramento, seven million burning tires triggered a state of emergency in August, and the fire is still not out. This happens all the time, because millions and millions of tires are piling up around the country. Getting rid of them isn't as easy as you might think, but it can be done. Good old-fashioned American ingenuity has not only come up with a solution, but one that might even save money. But some say good old-fashioned American politics is standing in the way, and You Pay the Bill.

(Voiceover) Here's Keith Morrison.

(You Pay the Bill graphic)

KEITH MORRISON reporting: (Voiceover) Ever wonder about tires? What happens to them when they get old and bald? You take them off at the local service station. You forget about them, and every year 250 million old tires, one for every living, breathing American, are thrown away. And where do most of them end up? In a place like this, in a tire pile.

(Cars on road; man removing tire; tires being dumped; tire piles)

MORRISON: This tire dump in Smithfield, Rhode Island, is said to be the second largest in the United States. Tires have been piling up here for 20 years. They now cover 14 acres of land. Authorities estimate there are at least 10 million tires in this pile alone. That's right, 10 million, and there are many such piles around America. Experts say they constitute far more than an eyesore by the side of the road. They are our environmental nightmare.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) All across the country dozens and dozens of tire piles have caught fire. And because a single tire contains at least a gallon of oil, these fires burn incredibly hot and are almost impossible to put out. This fire in Pennsylvania raged for four months before it finally burned itself out. This tire pile in Virginia caught fire and burned out of control for nine months.

(Tire fires)

Mr. DOUG HOWELL (Environmental & Energy Study Institute) : (Voiceover) It causes mass amounts of particulate black smoke getting in the air, runs off into streams and lakes and rivers, causing more pollution.

(Smoke; black stream)

MORRISON: (Voiceover) Doug Howell is an environmental attorney. He says tire piles may be hidden, but they pose a very real threat.

(Morrison and Howell talking)

Mr. HOWELL: For hundreds, if not thousands, of counties, it is the number one solid waste problem.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) Howell says 2 to 3 billion tires are piled up around the country in rubber mountains like this one in Sycamore, Ohio. With up to 80 million tires, it's considered the country's biggest. Why are tires so hard to get rid of? Well, for one thing, the steel belts that make them work better actually prevent recycling. You can't retread steel-belted tires. You can't bury whole tires in landfills. Their built-in air pockets help them work their way right back up to the surface. One solution that seemed promising is burning tires for fuel. But even though the furnaces apparently burn clean, people are still worried about the emissions and don't want them nearby. Tire furnaces are also prohibitively expensive, costing tens of millions of dollars to build, so only a handful have been built around the country. Even the owner of that Rhode Island tire dump, Billy Davis, acknowledges that when it comes to environmental threats, waste tires are a special, stubborn breed.

(Tire pile; tires on cars; landfill; tire furnace; Davis and Morrison talking; tire pile)

Mr. BILLY DAVIS: This ain't a Bill Davis problem. This is a United States problem. It's all over the country.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) But just outside Winslow, Arizona, could officials have come across an inspired solution to the tire pile problem? They say it's literally where the rubber meets the road. Here's how it works. Scrap tires are brought to this special plant near Phoenix. They're shredded into strips and the steel belts are removed by magnets. The strips are then ground into bits the size of sand grains, a material that's called crumb rubber. A computer mixes the crumb rubber in just the right proportion with the traditional asphalt mix of crushed stone, oil and sand, and voila, a super durable rubber asphalt. It looks just like any other highway, but engineers here say the road created is anything but conventional.

(Cars on road; truck; Winslow sign; trucks on road; asphalt being poured; tires being shredded; crumb rubber being mixed; asphalt being layed)

MORRISON: (Voiceover) George Way is an engineer with the Arizona Department of Transportation. He showed us this test road. On one side, a stretch of conventional asphalt four inches thick. On the other, just two inches of rubberized asphalt. The difference was striking. Take a look at the rubberized asphalt. Even after seven years of wear and tear it's still nearly as good as new.

(Way and Morrison talking; road)

Mr. GEORGE WAY: Virtually no crack in it at all, in this section, and that's been down seven years.

MORRISON: By golly, it's amazing.

Mr. WAY: It is. It's darn amazing. It's pretty impressive.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) As for the other stretch of road with four inches of regular asphalt, the constant stream of traffic has taken a heavy toll.

(Cracked road)

Mr. WAY: (Voiceover) That section actually started to crack up the first year, and it's gotten progressively worse every year.

(Cracked road; crack)

MORRISON: (Voiceover) Way says not only does crumb rubber make the road stronger...

(Morrison and Way looking at road)

Mr. WAY: And it still looks like asphalt.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) ...it also makes it smoother and quieter. And though the rubber mix costs more, Way says because you only have to use half as much material and the road lasts at least twice as long, in the end it's cheaper.

(Road; crumb rubber; asphalt being layed)

Mr. WAY: We've built over 1200 miles of this payment in Arizona in the last five years and had very good results. Very, very good results.

MORRISON: States like California, Arizona, and Florida and countries all around the world already use crumb rubber in roads successfully--I'm walking on it right now--so you'd think that rubberized asphalt would be just the thing to take care of some of the tire piles around the US and save taxpayers money. But as you'll see, it wasn't quite that simple.

(Voiceover) Just ask John Chafee, Republican senator from Rhode Island.
Remember that tire pile in Smithfield, Rhode Island? With the state's main water supply just a few miles away, that pile made Chafee nervous.

(Morrison and Chafee talking; reservoir)

Senator JOHN CHAFEE: This represents a--the potential of an incredible disaster.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) So the senator actually passed legislation that by last year would have required states to use crumb rubber in 20 percent of their federal road projects. A great way, Chaffee says, to help level those mountains of tires.

(Capitol building; tire pile)

Senator CHAFEE: Crumb rubber would take about a third of the tires that would be disposed annually. That's about 80 million a year.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) But there was one big obstacle, and it came from what you might think was an unlikely source, ironically, the ones who build the roads, the pavement industry. The industry's lobby led the fight in Washington to shoot down Chafee's measure, and it worked. The crumb rubber mandate was repealed.

(Pavement being layed; tire; capitol building)

Senator CHAFEE: It got blown away.

MORRISON: The asphalt lobby is that powerful that they can destroy a bill passed in Washington?

Senator CHAFEE: Well, yes.

MORRISON: Asphalt lobby? I mean, come on, really?

Senator CHAFEE: Well, there it is.

Mr. MIKE ACOTT: What we don't want is somebody from Congress jumping in and saying , you know, 'This is the best thing since sliced bread,' and prescribing it.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) Mike Acott is president of the National Asphalt Pavement Association, NAPA. Acott says the reason the asphalt industry opposed Chafee's bill was because pavers didn't want to be forced to use what they claim is an unproven and expensive technology.

(Acott and Morrison talking; NAPA building)

Mr. ACOTT: When you add crumb rubber it basically doubles the cost of the pavement.

MORRISON: Doubles it?

Mr. ACOTT: Doubles it. The only way that you can offset that cost is that the pavement has to last longer.

MORRISON: And does.

Mr. ACOTT: And unfortunately it doesn't.

MORRISON: It doesn't?

Mr. ACOTT: Well, let me show you a study that was done through the National Academy of Sciences, and it says here the field performance of asphalt rubber mixes...

MORRISON: Mm-hmm.

Mr. ACOTT: ...has been very mixed, very variable.

MORRISON: But a closer look at the same study cited by Acott shows that the mixed results were attributed in part to projects with poor design and field quality control. According to this very study, using the rubberized asphalt in the way it was perfected in Arizona does help resist cracking and abrasion in roads.

(Voiceover) And when it comes to cost, this study by the American Society for Testing and Materials clearly states, "Asphalt-rubber will provide life cycle cost effectiveness virtually 100 percent of the time."

(Study)

MORRISON: (Voiceover) Now, if you're wondering whether rubberized asphalt only works well in hot and dry places, remember that Arizona test road we showed you earlier. It wasn't built in the desert. It's in Flagstaff, an area that gets more than 100 inches of snow a year. And pavers who have actually worked with rubberized asphalt say it outperforms conventional asphalt in all kinds of weather.

(Road; snow on mountains; sun; pavers)

Mr. MARK BELSHE: Oh, it's great. Yeah, we love it.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) Mark Belshe is a NAPA member who works for an Arizona paving company. Belshe is puzzled why so many in the industry are so dead set against rubberized asphalt.

(Morrison and Belshe talking)

Mr. BELSHE: I wish I understood it. Really, I--I, you know, I think if you look at it hard enough you'll come around to the idea that it's a great idea, that its time has come.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) And others felt the same way. This memo obtained by DATELINE was sent to Acott by a NAPA member in South Africa named Ronny Renshaw. "We think your campaign against the use of crumb rubber is ill advised in view of the performance and cost benefits and the disposal of tires in the USA."

(Document)

Mr. ACOTT: The response was that we are not against crumb rubber. We told Mr. Renshaw that we were against the mandate. You can not have one-size-fits-all solution. You cannot mandate it. It just won't work that way.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) That sounds reasonable. After all, what industry likes to be told how to run its business? But critics charge the pavement industry's underlying reason for opposing rubberized-asphalt had more to do with money than a mandate. That's because longer-lasting roads made of half as much material means less work and perhaps smaller profits for traditional paving interests.

(Pavement being layed)

Mr. HOWELL: This is a financial threat to a lot of the asphalt paving industry.

Mr. ACOTT: That's absolutely ridiculous. OK, if we can get a pavement to last longer, we're for it.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) Whatever the motive, critics say the end result of NAPA's campaign against rubberized-asphalt was that an ideal solution to a dangerous problem ran into a road block.

(Crumb rubber; pavement being layed; tires on fire)

Mr. HOWELL: It was--it was a difficult fight.

MORRISON: You look a little frustrated, actually.

Mr. HOWELL: What I think is a really terrific technology suffered a black eye, and what we might achieve at the state level will take us an extra 20 years what we could have done at the federal level.

MORRISON: (Voiceover) So while the debate goes on, millions and millions of tires every year will continue to be thrown out, and tire piles around the country like the one in Rhode Island will remain a serious environmental threat.

(Tires)

Mr. DAVIS: You can't have it both ways, baby. You're either going to have the pile or you're going to have a way to get rid of them.

PAULEY: Senator Chafee isn't giving up his fight to reduce the nation's tire piles. He has a new idea, a small tax on each new tire sold. The money collected would, among other things, help states buy rubberized-asphalt for road projects.