Mountain of Tires in South Carolina Visible from Space

There are a lot of places where it's appropriate, or at least expected, to see tires. They could be thrown in a landfill, on display at the repair shop, or even hidden behind solar panels in a field. Even some of their more uncommon uses, as tire swings or pieces of modern art, wouldn't make most people bat an eye.

One place you shouldn't be able to see tires from is space – but South Carolina isn't terribly concerned about that. The state currently hosts a mound of 250,000 tires that covers some 50 acres and is, in fact, visible from space (for what it's worth, the tires are more difficult to locate on ground-level). It's unclear how all those tires got there, and apparently this isn't the first time this has happened, either. David Summers, Calhoun County Council Chairman, remembers a pile of tires from the 1990s. He said that the current pile “is a baby compared to what that one was”.

Apparently South Carolina has a lot of spare tires going around, but they might not be the only ones. Tires are notoriously hard to dispose of – the majority of them are synthetic, and they can be a pain to deal with. A lot of recycled tires end up being burned as fuel, despite the fact that when tires burn they reduce a variety of toxic substances including lead, benzene, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Because of this, recycling tires may not actually be an environmentally friendly thing to do. Still, there are ways to extend tire life – they should be inflated to the proper level at all times. In addition, good driving practices such as braking gently and not speeding can make tires last longer.

It's too late for the hundreds of thousands of tires that have already been dumped. Calhoun County's tire pile is being handled by a Jacksonville, FL. based company, who will extract oil and steel from them, or shred them to make fuel. The company has already transported ten to fifteen trailer loads of tires and they won't complete the project until 2012. Currently, motorists in South Carolina pay $2 for every tire they purchase – the money pays to recycle old tires. Clearly, a significant amount of tires aren't ever making it to a recycling center – it may be time for the state to find a new method for dealing with this problem. Preventing old tires from piling into mountains of waste has got to be easier than cleaning up the resulting mess.

Tom Cranford is a writer for Solar Home.