Should communities continue to charge for tire disposal?

The hole seems to be that the tire sellers (who are charging you a fee at the point of purchase) aren’t passing the money along to the solid waste people who are supposed to be picking up and processing tires for recycling. So I would ask the county or the state to account for the money charged for exactly that service.

Of course, that doesn’t address the problem of people from Pennsylvania or WV (or another county) coming in and dumping the tires out of malice,

I’m somewhat sympathetic to the people at the dump or the trash pickup service, because they incur real costs to pick up and process these tires – which can’t and shouldn’t be absorbed by the population at large.

I don’t have a good answer.

In Georgia, we pay $7/tire at the tire store – similar to your fee. But we still get people dropping tires on the side of the road.

It’s not a problem here like it was probably once was. It still costs but if you put them out most trash services remove them without additional charge. Bulky waste facilities take them at the same per pound fees as everything else. Most people don’t change their own tires anyway. I will say though a couple of years ago they drained a lake to service a dam that had not been drained fully in decades and you can guess what littered the bottom. It was sickening to see really.

Why not do it as a can/bottle deposit; $15 per tire when purchased and $9 back when you change tires ? Receipt from original sale must accompany trade in.

We have a bottle and can deposit law. We pay 5cents when we buy the drink in a can or bottle. When we bring the empties back to any store we get our 5 cents returned. Kids/adults collect the cans from the side of the road and keep the money. It made a big difference in litter.
What if the fee went up to $10 at the store and the customer received a $4 credit for each tire returned? I would gladly pick up those 4 disgusting tires and bring them to a shop if I got paid $16 rather than having to pay $24!

What happened to all the tires at the bottom of the lake? Did someone have to pay for them? If each had a $4 deposit the cleanup would go smoother.

Not sure, I suspect they were never cleaned up.
There was another lake drained in a different part of the state and I know they did a big clean up.

I don’t know what the rules are where I’ve lived, as I’ve never had it raised in conversation. People I’ve bought tires from have just taken any old tires I didn’t want, and not mentioned a fee.

Seems like the fee should just be worked into the price of buying a new tire, to the point that the service of disposing of tires is paid for in advance. If New Jersey does it and cheapskate slobs from New York come dumping their tires for free in New Jersey, New Jersey can send New York a bill, and make fun of them.

(Oh, and the wildlife sanctuary should have the right to charge $10,000 to people who dump stuff there.)

I’ll bet if tire disposal we’re free there will be far fewer at the bottom of lakes.
WhMaybe they make good habitat for fish. – unless they leech toxins into the water. Who knows.

@LuckyGuy Environmental biologists?

I think the fee here is $5 per tire, but the last time I bought tires they only charged $3. Tire places can resell the good used tires, but it shouldn’t matter to the old owner since he/she doesn’t have to deal with them.
Tire disposal fees are a good idea, if not always fair, because you can’t bury them in a landfill: They have to be ground up and reused/recycled somehow, like making an asphalt additive out of them. If buried without being ground up (shredded), they find their way back to the surface because of their elasticity/bounce.

@zaku There is a fine for dumping. The problem is the low probability of catching them in the act. I get it. They don’t want to pay the $24. It’s as simple as that.

Your suggestion was a good one. Charge extra when buying the tires and give you money for turning them in. It seems strange to penalize people for properly disposing the tires.

With the Returnable Bottle Bill we occasionally see people walking along the road picking up cans for $0.05 per can. One tire for $ 5 would be worth 100 cans! How much would it cost to have the DPW or the highway department come and pick it up? Way more than that.
Maybe the Town can pay a bounty for them.

Really cool idea. The risk is that people will start stealing tires. :/

I’m so glad you asked this. We sell tires in our golf cart repair business. State of Florida requires we pay $1 per tire for something?? We pass it along to the customer. We also have to pay $1.50 per battery. As far as I know it doesn’t entitle us to drop of the tire anywhere that I know of, but now I’m curious to know if it does and my husband just doesn’t know about it.

To recycle the tires we have to pay to give them to the recycle company, which annoys me. They use the material to make rubber mulch and other things that they sell. I can’t inagine they wouldn’t still be making a profit if they just took in the tires for free? I’ve never researched the numbers though.

When you pay your trash pick up what do they do with the tires?

Tires are collected by a local company, shredded & then sold to a local paving company. They add the shredded tires to the asphalt & then pave our roads The shredded rubber is supposed to increase the lifespan of the tarred road. This process has cut out the tire disposal fees.

@LadyMarissa Aha! So that means to me it is still profitable even if they charge nothing. Or, I might have that wrong.

I guarantee that it must be profitable or we’d still be paying our fees. Actually, they did a 1 year trial where we still paid our fees & the tires were donated to the paving company to see IF it was a worthy project. After that year, the paving company began buying the shredded tires. I’m pretty darn sure that the County is making money from selling the shredded tires & the paving company is still making their profit even after buying the tires. The propaganda coming out of the deal is that the shredded rubber contracts & expands during hot & cold weather at a rate that works well with the tar thereby reducing the repaving time required.

@LadyMarissa 30 years ago I saw a show about a company that had an asphalt mixture that had rubber in it that had better resistance to the effects of weather and other strains on the roads. I think the report might have been done in Detroit, but it might have been a different northern city. They said the asphalt lasted longer than what was being used in the current government contracts, fewer pot holes, and it used recycled rubber. People, probably unions, fought against changing to it, because it would mean fewer jobs. The people who fix the roads would be out of work. I think finally maybe the asphalt being used now is this better stuff. There might still be some hold out cities though. Who knows.

I’ve been doing a little research and see that Bridgestone will accept and repurpose tires that are collected as part of a community clean-up event
Here is the link discussing the program. Bridgestone .

“The Bridgestone Tires4ward program also recycles tires collected as part of organized public lands, rivers, streams and lakes clean-up events across the country. Citizens participating in an community clean-up event may request Bridgestone’s help recycling the tires collected as part of that effort by completing this form. Once the form is completed, Bridgestone will contact the clean-up project coordinator directly to coordinate the logistics of tire drop-off at a local Bridgestone retail store and/or on-site tire removal, a determination made based on the number of tires expected to be collected during an event. A Bridgestone Tires4ward representative will facilitate all coordination efforts. Logistics can be a challenge at some remote sites, but we will work to offer our full support of all organized community clean-up events.”

@LuckyGuy ”@zaku There is a fine for dumping. The problem is the low probability of catching them in the act. I get it. They don’t want to pay the $24. It’s as simple as that.”
I fully understand those conventional conversations around the issue. Hence my suggestions to:

1) Move the fee to the purchase, so disposal is funded and misbehavior by selfish would-be-weasel-outer-litterers has no incentive.

2) Raise the fee for violating a nature sanctuary, so that at least some of the weasels may be deterred by the size of the penalty, and if anyone is caught, more funds to support the nature sanctuary.

I also disagree that “it’s as simple as that” – when your people are dumping tires in nature sanctuaries to avoid a $24 fee, you’ve got some deep-seated cultural issues, and hand-waving them as “it’s as simple as that” seems like part of those cultural issues.

@Zaku If they didn’t have to pay $24 they (probably ) wouldn’t dump there.
If someone was paid to pick up the tires they (probably) wouldn’t be still on the ground.

I would gladly pick them up – if I didn’t get a bill for doing so

I’m thinking of making an effort to get the law changed. That will have more impact than just taking care of my immediate area.

@LuckyGuy Exactly my suggestion. If you charge the fee in advance, then you can make turning them in properly free. In fact, you can probably charge everyone less than the current fee, if it’s built into every new tire purchase.

Here, when you buy a quart of oil,you automatically pay a “disposal fee” at the time of purchase. Don’t see why this couldn’t be done with tires also..PAY IT FORWARD!!!

@LuckyGuy I’m going to look into that Bridgestone program. I didn’t see on the site where I can search to see if they are in my area. Did you see something like that? I might call tomorrow.

The new law be something like: Any store that sells more than x tires per year (or had more than y employees) must accept no more than 5 tires per week from an individual at no charge.

Right now all gasoline stations are required to accept used motor oil at no charge up to 5(?) gallons. The above would be similar.