Publish Date: 3/19/2005

A truck belonging to Tire Mountain in Hudson drives in Tuesday to deliver old tires that have been collected from tire dealerships. Tire Mountain wants to chip its 25 million tires and some waste railroad ties and burn them at a yet-to-be-built power plant. Times-Call/Hunter McRae

Fuel to Spare

Dump wants to shred tires to be burned at power plant

By Jenn Ooton

The Daily Times-Call

HUDSON — Tire piles are a fire hazard.

In fact, all that separates a mound of tires from becoming a long-burning tire fire is a lightning bolt or nearby brush fire.

They’re also a health hazard, giving rodents and West Nile-carrying mosquitoes a place to breed.

Dire warnings like those are common from Colorado Department of Local Affairs officials, who want the state’s large illegal tire dumps cleaned up. DOLA officials suspect there may be far more tire dumps, but they know for sure the state had 47 of them in 2001.

Tire landfill operators offer the same warnings of illegal tire dumps, which range from 10,000 tires to several million. They say Northern Colorado alone could have as many as 40 such piles, all of which should be cleaned up.

With big plans for the mountains of black tires Colorado residents throw out illegally each year, tire disposal companies have a vested interest in getting local governments involved in the effort to clean up tire piles.

A Weld County tire disposal company wants those tires to burn in a power generation plant it proposes to build.

Hudson-based Tire Recycling Inc., which operates one of three state-permitted, tire-only landfills, has offered to clean up illegal tire piles in Weld and Larimer counties.

The company, which charges 75 cents for every tire it collects, is hoping the two counties will apply for DOLA grants to pay Tire Recycling for the cleanup effort, which could include a well-known tire dump southwest of Loveland where an estimated 5 million tires are piled near high-end homes.

Since the late 1980s, dumping tires in non-permitted landfills has been illegal. Owners of land that for generations had been an OK place to toss out treadless tires were asked to get permits or clean up the mounds.

“Since the state didn’t aggressively enforce the cleanup and these tires don’t evaporate. ... Over time, they have a tendency to grow,” said Dwain Immel, president of Tire Recycling Inc.

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Tire Recycling Inc., still commonly known by its former name, Tire Mountain, documents illegal tire heaps in Northern Colorado. Aerial photos show thousands of black tires, looking like nests of ants, filling ravines and heaped against fence lines.

Immel said he wants to add those tires to Tire Recycling’s massive stockpile of about 25 million tires and eventually burn them to produced electricity.

On 40 acres in Hudson near the Burlington Northern Railroad, the company wants to build a power plant that could safely burn chipped tires and railroad ties.

Only about 23 percent of a tire is petroleum-based synthetic rubber. Tires also contain steel and other chemicals that don’t contribute to heat production. Those materials would be removed from the tires and recycled.

The wood and tire chips would then be burned in a boiler furnace, which would heat water to power a steam turbine. The turbine would spin an electrical generator.

About 47 percent of the 273 million tires scrapped in the United States in 2000 were burned to produce power, often to fuel paper mills, cement plants and metal foundries, because tires are cheaper than coal.

Lyons-based Cemex, for example, has long sought to burn tires to fuel kilns it uses to make cement. Cemex for the last several years has faced staunch opposition, including a lawsuit, from environmental activists who say tire burning pollutes air and water.

But Immel said he’s not worried. His company has talked to state air quality officials, and he thinks Tire Recycling can burn the tires cleanly to produce 50 megawatts of energy per year.

Immel’s company is one of several bidders that responded to Xcel Energy’s January call for approximately 2,500 megawatts of increased power generation Xcel says Colorado will need in the next eight years.

Tire Recycling won’t start building the power plant unless it signs a deal with Xcel.

The fields along Weld County Road 41 south of Tire Recycling Inc. are largely empty. Occasionally, a broken windmill, an irrigation sprinkler or a Baptist church breaks up the landscape.

And then a sea of small black tires in huge pits, skirted by huge tractor tires that serve as a makeshift fence, extends to the skyline.

On Tire Recycling’s more than 35 acres, tires are stuffed into pits that are 102 feet wide, 305 feet long and 19 feet deep.

“Ultimately, 20 years from now, there won’t be a tire on the ground here and it can be reclaimed,” Immel said. “Alfalfa can be put back here.”

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Weld County leaders last month directed staff to apply for DOLA grants to clean up the county’s up to 20 illegal tire dumps.

“It sounds like free money,” Weld County commissioner Bill Jerke said.

Today DOLA has about $1.7 million in funds earmarked for tire recycling programs. That money is generated by a $1 fee the state collects every time a tire is disposed of legally.

The Colorado Commission on Higher Education gets 25 cents of that $1 to pay for research on recycled tire products.

DOLA gets the rest to pay for cleanup programs and pay for recycling incentives.

Some of that is set aside to clean up illegal and legal tire dumps, and that money can be requested by local and county governments only.

A second grant program helps pay for projects that use waste tire products, including rubberized asphalt and playground materials.

DOLA’s third waste tire grant program hands out money to private companies that take and reuse scrap tires, such as companies that burn them as fuel or bundle them together to be used as windbreaks on farms and ranches.

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Ron King, vice president of Tire Recycling, said if Xcel decides not to buy power from the Hudson plant, Tire Recycling still intends to recycle its tires.

The company is also looking into selling its tires as rubberized asphalt, which King said lasts longer than traditional asphalt and reduces traffic noise.

Recycling tires is important, he said, because approximately 4.5 million tires are discarded in Colorado every year, or about one tire per person each year.

DOLA estimates that 2.1 or 2.2 million of those tires are disposed of legally at state-permitted tire landfills through tire dealers.

Only about 5 percent of those are recycled.

Jenn Ooton can be reached at 303-684-5295, or by e-mail at jooton@times-call.com.