Clarification of Scrap Tire Statements

by Michael Blumenthal, Rubber Manufacturers Association

I read with interest the article by Bill Monaghan (Scrap Tire Recycling Processes Have Come a Long Way) in the March 2004 edition. There, indeed, has been tremendous progress in the reduction of stockpiled scrap tires; the key components of which are state funded abatement projects and market development programs.

There is one statement that does need to be clarified. The Rubber Manufacturers Association (RMA) has never stated that there were two-to-three billion tires stockpiled in the U.S. That number was put out by the U.S. EPA in their 1992 Scrap Tire Market Study. Since 1994 the RMA has been able to collect enough data to estimate the number of stockpiled tires. The high water mark was probably somewhere around one billion tires in stockpiles. Over the course of the last 13 years that number has been reduced to about 280 million scrap tires, of which some 25 million are in Ohio.

Over the course of the next several years we anticipate that states with large inventories of stockpiles and a scrap tire fund (Ohio, Michigan, New York and Alabama) will continue to reduce the overall number by a significant amount.

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