Skip to footer

How California's recycled tires turn into smog over the state

California has implemented a system that ensures more of its tires get recycled. But some of its scrap tires end up as exports that then turn into pollution overseas.

|
Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters/File
Traffic moves on the arrival level of Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, California (November 21, 2012).

California drivers generate 40 million used tires every year, and everyone from sellers to policymakers has struggled to figure out what to do with them.

Old tires can be burned as fuel, or end up in landfills.

But California lawmakers want more tires to be recycled--and created an elaborate infrastructure to see that they were.

There's just one thing those environmentally-minded lawmakers didn't count on.

Over the past year, large numbers of tires have been exported from California to Asia, and they've come back across the ocean as smog, according to a recent report by TakePart.

A system of regulations and incentives has ensured that more used tires in California are recycled.

But increases in the price of Australian coal and Southeast Asian natural rubber threw a wrench into the system.

Recycling was never the cheapest option, and Asian buyers looking to burn tires as fuel in factories or use their rubber in new tires were eager to take something everyone else wanted to get rid of.

So instead of going to recycling facilities, tires started getting compressed into "bales" and sent overseas.

Exports are a negligible part of California's scrap tire market in 2007, but they increased steadily in 2008 and 2009, according to CalRecycle--the agency in charge of California's recycling scheme.

In 2010, exports doubled to about one fifth of the market. In 2011, they were a quarter of the market.

And all of those exported tires have come back to haunt Californians.

Pollution from China can cross the Pacific Ocean and affect California air.

While Western states significantly reduce pollution between 2005 and 2010, their air quality remained the same because of a simultaneous increase in emissions from China, according to a 2015 study by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

In addition to contributing to excess emissions, the exports also starved California's tire market of material, potentially damaging the state's ability to recycle tires on a large scale.

In 2013 and 2014, though, China's economy slowed, and the price of Australian coal decreased.

This ended the period of rampant exports, and analysts believe California's recycling infrastructure will recover.

In fact, lawmakers are pushing even more aggressive goals.

A bill  signed in 2011--during the height of the tire-export mania--calls for the state recycle 75 percent of its solid waste by 2020.

To help meet that goal, proposed Assembly Bill 1239 would add another fee to the one the state already charges on new tires.

This would help fund additional measures by CalRecycle to incentivize recycling.

This article first appeared at GreenCarReports.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to How California's recycled tires turn into smog over the state
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2016/0218/How-California-s-recycled-tires-turn-into-smog-over-the-state
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe