The Best Article you will ever read on Tires in Pittsburgh. Installation, Repair, Used & Recycling.

by Joseph Conti and Doomberg Media Group

Foreword:

I was visiting a local Auto Repair shop, and the owner was discussing some best practices and anecdotes surrounding the topic of tire buying. Then we started talking about tire disposal.

You should be very familiar with tire disposal fees.

Tire disposal fees are part of many other fees charged besides the tire. You often see a stack of tires with pricing. These point-of-sale displays can be misleading because they do not break down line item by line item the "out-the-door all-inclusive price." These are the fees associated with purchasing tires.

• tire price

• disposal fee

• valve stem

• mounting and balancing

• often alignments too

Tire Disposal

When I visited with my friend who owns a prominent Pittsburgh Auto Shop, he told me a fascinating story. Then after you read about this scammer, you will gain an appreciation for why this scammer made thousands and then vanished without a trace.

Fortunately, the man who told me the story below wasn't a victim of this con because he always does his due diligence and has a rule that he won't make big business decisions or changes except after 48 hours. This rule allows time to research further, discuss with colleagues, and avoid scams.

The Tire Recycling & Disposal Scam, How it Works? Tire shops do not have the facility on-site to satisfy government regulations for properly handling and storing old tires.

So what do they do?

They contract with someone who will travel to their auto shop and deliver the tires to a recycling facility. The third-party charges the auto shop based on volume. If they only pick up a few tires per week, then the cost per tire goes up because fuel and labor unit pricing are higher than volume pricing. A scammer in Pittsburgh would post ads that ran like this. Pittsburgh Police detectives called it the "The Pittsburgh Disappearing Tire Swap Seven Step Scam"

The Scammer hits about 5 Pittsburgh Boroughs, Townships, Municipalities by posting one employment ad that reads like this, "Own your own business. Be Your Own Boss while Making the Planet Greener." then here are the 7 steps

1. The tire recycling business is a $29 Billion industry; you can leverage this potential while being your own boss and business owner.

2. Rent a box truck at Ryder, Budget, or U-Haul.

3. Pick up used tires at these locations (made up names just so you get the idea) a.) BillyBobs Discount Tires b.) AAA Allegheny #1 Tires c.) 3 River Tire Deals d.) Deer Field Discount Tires

4. We will meet when you return your Ryder or U-Haul Box Truck, unload the valuable tires onto our 18-wheeler, dispose of them per Pennsylvania Dept. of Environment Regulations, and pay you cash on the spot.

5. Average earners make between $4,000 and $7,000 per week, depending on how many runs they can make per week.

6. The con artist had already collected from Pittsburgh tire store installers (garage shops and retail outlets). Finally, the con man fails to meet up with the contracted laborers who spent their time, money, and energy renting Ryder Box Trucks.

7. Sticking the "marks" or victims with the Ryder/U-Haul rental fee and sticking the Ryder or U-Haul company with a box truck full of old tires that must be legally and expensively disposed of.

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There are numerous legitimate Tire Recycling Companies such as Liberty Tire Recycling The Nation's #1 tire recycling company, Liberty Tire Recycling, writes.

Once we gather the tires, we process them, reselling ones that can still be safely used and breaking down the others into raw materials to give them a second life. Manufacturers then use our recycled rubber to create safe products like molded rubber goods, rubber mulch, rubberized flooring, rubberized asphalt, and shock-absorbing athletic surfaces.

New Tire purchases must charge customers tire disposal fees to cover the costs of adequately handling and disposing of used tires. There are several reasons for this practice:

1. Environmental Regulations: Disposing of tires improperly can have negative environmental consequences. Tires can take a long time to decompose and can release pollutants if they are burned or dumped inappropriately. To mitigate these risks, many jurisdictions have implemented regulations that require proper tire disposal. Tire stores charge disposal fees to ensure compliance with these regulations and to support environmentally responsible practices.

2. Recycling and Processing Costs: Used tires can be recycled or processed in various ways, such as being shredded for use in playground surfaces, used as fuel in industrial processes, or turned into crumb rubber for various applications. These recycling and processing methods incur costs. Tire disposal fees help cover these expenses, including transportation, sorting, processing, and other associated costs.

3. Collection and Storage: Tire stores need to collect and store used tires until they can be properly disposed of or sent for recycling. This requires space and resources. Charging a disposal fee helps offset the costs of managing the collection and storage process.

4. Convenience and Customer Service: Tire stores often provide the convenience of accepting and disposing of old tires when customers purchase new ones. By charging a disposal fee, they can offer this service and ensure that the tires are handled appropriately without imposing a financial burden on the store itself.

At the turn of this century, a consumer product safety scandal nearly sunk two iconic US companies—Firestone and Ford—and severed their century-long commercial relationship. An unusually high number of Firestone tires were experiencing catastrophic tread separation failure, resulting in hundreds of deaths in the US alone.

The failures were predominantly occurring on the first-generation Ford Explorer, leading to dramatic rollover events that understandably doused the fuel of outrage on an already hot corporate fire. Each company blamed the other, Congressional hearings dominated the nightly news, and billions in shareholder value were destroyed on both sides.

The drama between Ford and Firestone drew broad attention to the delicate marvel of engineering, physics, and chemistry inside the modern tire. Tire manufacturers must optimize for safety, performance, endurance, and cost—“an average tire contains well over 100 separate components. Tires can include natural rubber, synthetic rubber, steel, nylon, silica (derived from sand), polyester, carbon black, petroleum, etc.” As the only point of connection between vehicle and road, tires play an outsized role in driving performance and passenger safety.

As with most highly engineered products where cost is a defining constraint, by the time a tire reaches end-of-life it does so as a significant pollution issue. Complex materials with dozens of unique components are inherently hard to recycle, and there’s little of value to fetch from the gemish of plastic, steel, and other additives. Although tires have similar potential heat energy per pound as oil, directly burning them is impractical in most settings. To produce what’s known as “tire-derived fuel” (TDF), the spent product must be shredded such that the embedded steel can be fished out with magnets. Even after these measures, TDF is a dirty burn, emitting excess amounts of zinc and other pollutants into the environment.

Despite this well-known complication, the West’s insatiable appetite for “renewable energy” has creatively metabolized this pollution problem into a proposed green energy miracle (emphasis added throughout):

“When scientists think of a ‘biomass’ fuel, organic materials like wood pellets, timber scraps or other plant matter that can be burned typically comes to mind. But recent votes by the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) have stretched that definition, potentially allowing facilities to add scrap tires and even natural gas to the mix they burn to produce electricity.

The change has led to an uproar from environmental groups, who say the five-member elected utility regulator skirted its normal processes to push the change through without adequately considering potential pollution impacts.”

The absurd gambit by the Georgia Public Service Commission to reclassify spent tires as “biomass” highlights the truism that, when it comes to environmental policy, sustainability is what the government says it is. This is how it came to be, for example, that clear-cutting forests in the US Southeast, chopping them into pellets that are then shipped across the ocean and burned for heat value in the UK is considered “carbon-free.” (No, really, check it out.) If Georgia’s policy on tires is implemented, the state will undoubtedly climb the leaderboard of “greenest” in the US—a hollow designation.

The fate of end-of-life tires (ELTs) poses tough questions for environmentalists, policymakers, and industry captains alike. Given limited resources, society’s obsession with reducing carbon emissions at any price is crowding out sound investments in solving pollution problems of the here and now. Just how big is the problem of zombie tires, what are we currently doing with them, and will the mandated transition to electric vehicles (EVs) make things worse? The numbers might surprise you, so let’s spin a few wheels.

According to a recent report by The Tire Industry Project, one billion tires reach end-of-life each year, and there are approximately four billion of them sitting in landfills and stockpiles the world over. (Astonishingly, one billion tires stacked flat would stretch from the surface of the earth to that of the moon.) The industry produces approximately 1.6 billion new tires a year, which means the scale of annual tire retirement is only going to expand from here.

The growth potential becomes apparent when you peruse vehicle ownership data by country. In the chart below, we plot per capita vehicle ownership for the seven most populous countries in the world. The US is the largest consumer by a mile with 831 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants, while the other six countries—whose combined population exceeds 3.7 billion—have a weighted-average ownership of just 132 per 1,000. Said another way, a population 11 times the size of the US currently has just 1/6th the vehicle ownership. Staggering—and unlikely to remain static, let alone retreat.

The most recent biannual report from The US Tire Manufacturers Association offers useful detail into the US spent tire market. In 2021, 315 million ELTs were generated. Of this total, 42 million were re-marketed as used tires. Of the remaining 273 million, 77 million were used in the production of crumb rubber asphalt, 76 million were crushed and burned in TDF facilities, and 40 million were placed in landfills. The number of landfilled tires has been steadily increasing in the past decade, while the amount burned in TDF facilities has been gradually falling as environmental opposition to the practice has grown. The chart below captures these trends as measured in thousands of tons:

Although the number of exports has been decreasing, the US—like many developed countries—still dumps a sizeable number of tires onto the developing world, fueling a burgeoning and environmentally catastrophic international trade. An explosive report from Reuters in 2019 gave details on the West’s abuse of the lax environmental standards of poorer countries to circumvent costly alternatives:

“Using unpublished customs data and interviews with dozens of industry sources, Reuters documented a growing international trade in waste tires that pollute the communities that host them, according to local authorities and health experts.

For many developed countries, shipping tires abroad is cheaper than recycling them domestically. That helped drive international trade in rubber waste to nearly 2 million tonnes in 2018, equivalent to 200 million tyres, from 1.1 million tonnes in 2013.

The trade has also been fed by ravenous fuel demand for industrial furnaces in countries like India, the emergence of inexpensive Chinese pyrolysis equipment, and weak regulations worldwide.”

While the developing world wobbles under the weight of used tires, Western governments are fixated on overhauling their existing fleet of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, investing hundreds of billions in subsidies and credits to proliferate electric vehicles in the name of reducing carbon emissions. This will absolutely have the unintended consequence of making the dead tire situation even worse:

“Regular tires wear out roughly 20% faster on an EV than on an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle. Many EVs today come with specialized tires, but even these typically need more frequent changes than traditional versions. Why is that? EVs need special tires because they put more pressure on them than ICE vehicles. First of all, EVs are heavier. Ford’s F-150 Lightning weighs 1,600 pounds more than a similar conventional F-150. This extra weight, which comes mainly from heavy batteries, means tires have to deal with more resistance as they drive. Electric motors also deliver more torque than their gas and diesel counterparts. Torque delivery is also instantaneous in an EV, placing immediate and heavy pressure on the car’s tires as the driver presses the accelerator. EV tires typically feature better grip to deal with this torque, but that friction comes at the cost of faster wear and tear.”

“Gee, Doomy,” you might be thinking, “this sure is a lot of tire talk.”

Indeed. Compare the media coverage of this important and pressing environmental concern with the avalanche of propaganda you have undoubtedly absorbed on the subjects of EVs and alternative energy. As a practical demonstration of this mismatch of priorities, consider the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The full text exposing the fire-hose of cash directed toward abating climate change can be found here. A keyword search of its 274 pages for “battery” returns 45 hits. The word “solar” returns a hefty 43. How many hits are there for “tire”?

Not a one.

For all the controversy around whether and how to minimize carbon emissions, we suspect there would be far less opposition to a practical, big-to-small approach that directs resources toward abating serious pollution issues like this. What we have instead is an exercise in semantics without substance. If “The Peach State” has its way, the solution to this pollution is to call it “biomass” and let the accolades pour in.