Rhode Island was once home to one of the biggest piles of discarded tires east of the Mississippi River, named the “Davis Tire Pile” by state and federal officials after Billy Davis, owner of the land on Tarkiln Road in Smithfield where some 6 million tires spread like a rubber sea, 35 feet deep in places, according to a 1996 story by The Associated Press.

Davis, who died in 2024, acknowledged being an “ornery Rhode Islander through and through,” the AP wrote. He didn’t bend easily to the demands of regulators, and was convinced he was sitting on a black gold mine of tires that someday would bring him a fortune, rather than the $32 million cleanup required by the Environmental Protection Agency.

To help pay for the clean up of what would become a Superfund site, the EPA reached a settlement with 54 companies, many of them large corporations, which had disposed of hazardous waste on the site. In addition to piling up millions of tires, Davis “had allowed tank trucks to dump wastes directly into lagoons and seepage pits, which contaminated the soil and groundwater in the area,” The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Mark Dennen, a supervising environmental scientist in the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, points to the Davis tire pile as a prime example of the scale of the problem presented by the 280 million tires that are discarded in the United States every year. Dennen estimates nearly a million tires are discarded in Rhode Island annually.

“There’s a lot of illegal dumping of tires, because they’re hard to get rid of; you can’t put them in the trash,” Dennen said. “I’m sure you’ve seen them everywhere; in urban parks, the tires show up overnight. We see them a lot in rivers too. When they do river cleanups they always find them.”

The driving force behind illegal dumping are the fees charged to dispose of tires, which are typically between $3 and $5 for a car tire and more for bigger truck tires, according to Shannon Choquette, an environmental analyst with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. In Rhode Island, that fee ranges from $8-$14, depending on the municipality.

“Tires are a difficult material to manage for a variety of reasons,” Choquette said. “The sheer amount of scrap tires created make the material a challenge to keep up with. Scrap tires can be a major fire risk in landfills and stockpiles. Tires are made of a variety of materials [natural rubber, synthetic rubber, textiles, steel, binders] and the composition of these materials changes depending on the type of tire, which of course impacts possible end-uses of the material.”

The risk of fire was enough to keep firefighters in Smithfield on edge for years, according to the AP, because every firefighter knows tire fires are monsters. The Rhinehart Tire Fire in Virginia burned for nine months in 1983, causing extensive environmental damage, before the 7 million tires involved could be extinguished.

“There have been numerous fires when it burns so hot firefighters can’t put it out because water will evaporate before it gets there,” Dennen said. “Tires have a higher BTU than coal, with very toxic emissions. They create liquids, too, that get into the aquifer.”

It’s for these reasons, Dennen said, that DEM created a regulation requiring a permit for storing more than 100 tires.

“When you responsibly store tires, you segregate them so every tire doesn’t catch fire,” he said. “In addition to that very significant risk of fire, there are real human health risks. When you dump tires, wherever you dump them you accumulate water in the tires and mosquitoes breed. It’s ideal mosquito breeding grounds.”

And mosquitos carry diseases such as West Nile virus, outbreaks of which regularly occur in the Northeast.

“As tires degrade pieces of rubber float everywhere,” Dennen continued. “Steel-belted radials have iron that separates from rubber as the tires decompose. Both have significant environmental issues associated with them.”

At the crux of the tire problem is the fact there are limited markets for recycling them. The most common use is as tire-derived fuel, or TDF, but that has obvious drawbacks in terms of generating greenhouse gases, both when the tires are burned for energy and when they are transported to one of the few facilities set up to handle them. The Product Stewardship Institute says 32% of discarded tires are burned as tire-derived fuel.

“In the Northeast, many states rely heavily on tire-derived fuel, often transported long distances since the facility in Sterling, Conn., closed down,” said Shaina Cohen, program manager for hazardous waste and waste site cleanup for the Northeast Waste Management Officials’ Association. “Other recycling options are either limited in capacity or not economically viable at scale. When disposal options shrink or costs rise, states often see increased stockpiling and illegal dumping.”

Dennen noted that a lot of controversy swirled around the Sterling facility when it was open, as Connecticut legislators tried to ban tires from Rhode Island from going to Sterling.

The ban “was ruled unconstitutional because of the interstate commerce clause,” Dennen said. “You can’t tell people they can’t send something out of state and waste is part of commerce. It was struck down but the (Connecticut) Legislature re-passed it.”

In the end it was probably economics that brought down the Sterling facility, according to Dennen.

“It may be it wasn’t worth maintaining the expense of air pollution control,” Dennen said. “There are very significant costs in meeting air quality requirements. If you look regionally, nobody has built a new incinerator in the past 20 or 30 years, and all these waste-to-energy facilities are getting old, reaching the end of life, but nobody is proposing to build new ones. That tells me the economics aren’t there.”

There are also environmental concerns regarding other uses of scrap tires, such as grinding them down for use as lightweight fill or drainage material, or even to make athletic fields. This last use is particularly controversial.

“With regard to athletic fields made from ground tire rubber, the pushback is largely driven by uncertainty around potential exposure to chemicals present in tires,” Cohen said. “While federal and state studies have examined these materials, public concern has persisted — particularly around frequent contact by children and athletes.”

So, are there any silver bullets out there to solve the tire problem? Not so far.

“Emerging technologies such as pyrolysis and other recycling approaches are being explored, but most are still limited in scale and not yet a regional solution,” Cohen said.

Tire pyrolysis is a complex process in which waste tires are shredded and then broken down using pressure and heat in the absence of oxygen to create byproducts. One of those byproducts is a synthetic oil that can be substituted for petroleum while also reducing carbon emissions by 90%, according to Revolve Carbon Materials Inc.

Dennen remains skeptical.

“People see (tire pyrolysis) as the next big thing, but when you look at pyrolysis facilities you can’t find one that operates economically for a long period of time,” he said. “I haven’t seen any work on an industrial scale in the Northeast.”