Getting Rid of Grandpa’s Old Tires

SACRAMENTO —  I’ve got carbon black in my veins.

--Brooks Firestone, grandson of tire maker Harvey Firestone

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The talk at dinner table growing up always got around to tires. “Radial versus cross ply, tube versus tubeless, how they blew out or didn’t,” recalls Assemblyman Brooks Firestone (R-Los Olivos). “From white walls to new plants to Indianapolis.”

His father was Leonard K. Firestone, California president of Firestone Tire & Rubber Co., founded by Harvey Firestone in 1900. As the century closes out, grandson Brooks is trying to help clean up the residue rubbish.

It’s a big mess--not of the family Firestone’s making, to be sure, but nonetheless an unintended byproduct of Harvey’s pioneering.

Californians throw away 30 million tires a year, according to the state Waste Management Board. About 18 million get used--some retreaded, mixed in asphalt or fashioned into a product, such as a mat; but most are burned as fuel in cement kilns or for power generation. The unwanted remaining 12 million are shredded and buried in landfills.

An even bigger problem than the landfill cloggers are the estimated 30 million old tires piled up--legally or illegally--in monstrous mounds all over the state, often in foothill canyons. They breed rats, mosquitoes, rattlesnakes and fire combustion. Countless unsightly old baldies also have been tossed into streams, along roads or into orchards.

“It’s a whole area my grandfather never envisioned,” says Firestone, a vintner. “He envisioned putting the country on tires. Now in the ‘90s, recycling is part of our consciousness, whereas it just simply wasn’t in the early 1900s. For me, it’s kind of a natural progression.

“The family’s come full circle.”

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A good place to see both the problem and a solution is one hour south of Sacramento, three miles up a gravel road off I-5 at the Westley truck stop. There, crammed into a canyon among barren hills--barren, that is, except for flammable tall grass--is the West’s largest tire dump. The best guess is there are 5 million to 7 million tires.

The solution is an adjacent power plant that has been burning about 6 million tires a year and generating enough electricity for 18,000 homes. The emission is relatively clean and the small white plume barely visible.

Seems simple, but this situation has more twists than a coiled rattler. The pile has not shrunk because tires have been arriving as fast as they’re burned.

There’s also a financial dilemma. The market price for tire-generated power has plummeted because of cheap oil and a 1996 electricity deregulation bill. So by year’s end, PG&E; will slash its payments for the power by two-thirds. That could mean a financial blowout for the plant, the only one of its kind in California.

That’s where Firestone is trying to help--not only this plant, owned by Modesto Energy Ltd., but any other outfit that can make good use of cumbersome old tires.

Here, you’ve got to remember the central element of old tire economics: Nobody buys worn out tires. You can’t give them away. You can’t even take one to the local dump. You’ve got to pay somebody to take it off your hands.

Buy a new tire, you pay an “environmental fee,” maybe $1.25. The dealer pays a “tire jockey” 80 cents to haul off the oldie. The jockey pays 30 cents to dump it at Westley. The dump owner pays the power plant 15 cents to burn it.

That’s not enough incentive, Firestone feels. His solution: Pay a 32-cent state subsidy for each old tire used productively. Raise the money by doubling--from 25 to 50 cents--the state “recycling fee” paid by the tire buyer; plus extend the fee to new cars.

The bill also requires the state to use more tires in road building and cracks down on illegal dumpers.

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“I love tires,” Firestone says. “I revere my grandfather. I think my grandfather would like what I’m doing.”

It’s the Legislature he’s not so sure about.

The bill is due to be debated on the Assembly floor this week and there’s trouble. The fee increase is considered a tax, so a two-thirds vote is required. Conservatives may balk at any sniff of a tax hike, even one that benefits business.

Liberals may side with the Sierra Club. It objects to tire burning, especially in cement kilns--even if tires do burn cleaner than coal, the usual fuel.

Then there’s politics. Firestone intends to run for lieutenant governor and Democrats may not want to give him a good bill, especially one that encroaches onto their turf of environmental cleanup.

Meanwhile, old tires litter the landscape. There aren’t many solutions: We can keep piling them up for snakes and arsonists. Wait for government to handle it. Or pay entrepreneurs to do the dirty work. Seems simple. But nothing’s simple in Sacramento.