Mountain of tires at Midway dump to be reduced to molehill, eventually

For years, flocks of starlings have made their way to an unlikely wintering ground south of Colorado Springs: the Midway  tire dump.

There, among the malodorous piles of cracked and blackened rubber, the birds have whiled away the months and then departed in the spring.

Eventually, the starlings may have to find new winter quarters. A new company, Colorado Energy Recyclers, has purchased the dump and plans to bring in a giant shredding machine within the next year or so that will chop the tires into one-inch cubes to be used as fuel at a cement kiln in Pueblo.

The process of shredding the tires and emptying the dump will take about a decade. That’s because the 58-acre dump, located south of Pikes Peak International Raceway on the west side of Interstate 25, contains 20 to 30 million tires and possibly as many as 50 million tires. “No one knows how many tires are actually in the dump because the previous owners didn’t keep records,” said Commissioner Jim Bensberg.

El Paso County officials recently entered into an agreement with Colorado Energy Recyclers, an entity of Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua, to obtain grants and other funding to clean up the dump.

There’s conflicting information about when the dump was opened. Some say it opened in the early 1980s and others put it a few years later. Either way, Bensberg said the facility has been an eyesore and fire threat for years. Some of the pits in which the tires have been deposited are 50 feet deep. If the tires were to catch fire from a lightning strike or a grass fire, the tires could burn for several years, he said.

State Rep. Marsha Looper, a Calhan Republican who is sponsoring a bill in the Legislature dealing with waste tires, said a fire would be catastrophic. In California, she said, a tire dump containing only 7 million tires caught fire and burned for two years.

 “Because the smoke is so toxic and black, Interstate 25 would probably have to be shut down and property owners within a 15-mile radius evacuated,” she said.

Related story: Tire-recycling fee diverted to balance state budget

Grupo Cementos, a Mexico-based company, in 2008 completed construction of a state-of the art cement kiln in Pueblo and wants to use the tires as a supplemental fuel in its kiln, said Verne Stuessy, manager of GCC’s cement plant in Pueblo.

The company purchased the Midway facility during a bankruptcy proceeding in October of 2008 for $2 million.  Since then, the company has invested another $1 million to clean up the landfill, Stuessy said. The mounds of tires have been divided into smaller cells, fire lanes have been constructed, dirt trucked in, and a $40,000 perimeter fence erected.

Stuessy said the improvements will greatly lessen the fire hazards and allow fire officials to contain a blaze should one break out. “It’s safe out there now.”

The company still has to get a permit modification from the state to burn the tire-derived fuel, or TDF, in its kiln. Currently, it has a permit to burn coal. As part of the permitting process, emissions data will be gathered from the plant’s stacks and evaluated, said Christopher Dann, a spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Air Pollution Control Division.

The  federal Environmental Protection Agency has endorsed the use of TDF as one of the best uses of waste tires. Ash residues from tire-derived fuel may contain lower heavy metal contents and produce lower nitrogen oxides emissions than some forms of coal, the EPA states on its web site.

By burning waste tires in its kiln, Stuessy said his company will extend the life of its coal mine in southern Colorado, reduce its costs for shipping fuel, and help county officials get rid of a long-term problem, he said. “We’re reducing our carbon footprint,” he said.

With energy prices increasing in recent years, the market for tire-derived fuel has expanded throughout the United States. In some regions, the demand for tire products, such as TDF, has actually exceeded the supply, according to a report by the Rubber Manufacturers Association.  By 2007, 123 facilities were using tire-derived fuel, the association reported.

Colorado has two of the largest stockpiles of waste tires in the country – the Midway facility and a dump near Hudson, northeast of Denver. Jeannine Natterman, a spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said the Hudson facility contains about 30 million tires, but news reports have put the number of tires in the Hudson facility much higher.

Looper said the Midway and Hudson facilities are the largest waste tire facilities in the United States. “People just came in and started dumping tires in the monofills without any oversight,” she said. “We have an out-of-control waste tire problem in Colorado.”

Due to the steep recession, the demand for cement is down and the Pueblo plant has not been operating at full capacity. But the company is still obtaining not only the air modification permit it needs to burn the tires, but also recycling permits from the county and state, which will allow the Midway facility to begin accepting tires again.

Stuessy said they’re going to work with El Paso County and other counties by accepting, free of charge, tires that have been dumped illegally. “There are many wildcat dumps throughout the state,” Stuessy said. “They’re environmental problems and safety issues.”

El Paso County Fire Marshall Jim Reid said the clean-up will take a long time. “We eat the elephant one bite at a time. Once we get Midway cleaned up, we’ll tackle other sites.”

Added Bensberg, ”This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Contact the writer: 476-4825