Trash day

What do you do with six million tires?

By Sam Smith

On Wednesday of last week, the US Environmental Protection Agency cheered as the first phase of cleanup was completed on an enormous tire pile in Rhode Island. The site was considered the biggest environmental threat in decades to face our tiniest state, and as the final truck left the site carrying the last of its six million tires with it, the little state just felt a little cleaner.

But what exactly do you do with six million used tires? Well, if you’re Rhode Island, you send them to Maine. Merry Christmas!

But don’t worry. One state’s environmental hazard is another’s cheap fuel, according to Randy McMullin, an environmental specialist with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection’s Portland office. For the last six years McMullin has been overseeing the cleanup and recycling of some of Maine’s biggest tire piles. We caught up with him last week to find out how the used-tire business is going and why the hell we’re dealing with Rhode Island’s garbage.

Q: We’ve got six million tires coming up from Rhode Island. How could we possibly need six million used tires in Maine?

A: I wouldn’t say we need tires up here, but what’s going on is perfectly acceptable. A company in Eliot got the contract to chip the tires. There are two big uses for chipped tires: tire-derived fuel, which the majority of tires in Maine go into; the other use is in civil-engineering, that’s a little more recent. Two of my projects included the Jetport exit on the turnpike; used about 1.2 million tires as light-weight fill there. And now we’re using roughly one million tires as light-weight fill on the new Exit 8.

Q: So how many used tires do we already have in Maine?

A: We probably have in the neighborhood of 15 million tires that are in various piles in various parts of the state. We’ve cleaned up well over 10 million in the last five years.

Q: That’s a lot of tires.

A: Oh man, I tell you. A million tires is a lot of tires. When you go out and look at a pile with a million tires, you look at it and you say, “That’s a lot of tires.”

Q: So when you were a kid did you imagine you’d grow up to be the guy that gets rid of old tires?

A: That’s an easy one: no. My mother still cries when I tell people I’m the tire guy. She says, “We had such hopes for you. You went to college and everything.”

Q: That’s funny.

A: That’s sad, to make my mother cry.

Q: So what did your mother want you to do?

A: I don’t know what my mother wanted me to do. I’d have to think about it . . . I used to work in sewage, and I couldn’t tell if working in trash was a step up, a step down, or a step sideways.

But I like this job. When I signed on to this department six years ago, I said, “Look, I don’t like getting bored.” And I’ve never been bored. Solid-waste disposal is a very challenging process. There’s always something exciting happening.