Along the lines of tires and rubber mulch . . . I've always admired
how well old cars work as mulch: park 'em on a lawn, and nothing
grows underneath them! Parking old non-running wrecks in gardens
might work well at keeping weeds down: a great reuse of wreckage from
our post-industrial society.
At 08:31 AM 2/18/2009, Chris Reid wrote:
The internet is wonderful at how it can make the mundane look
authoritative, or history can be rewritten (government documents) at
the click of a button. Frnakly, I cannot find anything that says
that whole tires are toxic -- plenty saying how good they are (scrap
tire industrial groups, companies that sell plans for tire swings,
the Texas consumer product safety commission,....hmmmm)
In the case of the Noble Foundation link, where a description of how
to make yourself some rubber boards from tires is given, I looked at
the funding and purpose of the foundation and it is an oil/energy
magnate's fortune being spent down. Among the purposes of the
foundation is to be true to the ideas of the now-dead energy baron,
Mr. Noble.
The Chairman is a lawyer, and I couldn't find a bio of the person in
charge of their agricultural division. You can't contact them via
the internet -- you have to call them or write to them. Thus, I
could not quickly send them a link to the shredded tire research and
ask whether creating dust and cutting up tires/making boards out of
tires is such a good idea. They may do great stuff, but I haven't
found anyone touting them as world thought leaders on environmental
safety or agricultural innovation.
In terms of what I have found on tires and toxicity to plants and
humans, I will below add in a link about the shredded rubber mulch
and some of what offgases and leaches from the shredded
product. The tire itself may be much more stable -- but I couldn't
find anything about what the risks are to kids and pets and
water/environment over time (acute toxicity is not the issue for
people but it could be for some aquatic organisms).
The link: EHH hired the CT Agricultural Experiment Station to do a
brief study that attempted to identify what comes out of shredded
mulch/ CAES is a places that I have followed for years and can say
without question that it works very hard to keep its science true to
science,. Their study is also online, but it is a bit technical so
I thought maybe the bullet point results from EHH would be of more interest:
http://ehhijournal.org/TurfOpEdKY.html
Astroturf is essentially using these toxic rubber tires to make
something kids and professional ball teams play on. It also
offgasses and leaches. I don't think we are doing our kids any favors.
But does the whole tire pose the same risk as the shredded tire? Or
do we just not want it anywhere near our gardens? Part of the
leaching properties and offgassing of toxic substances is stepped up
by the shredding of the tires, since more surfaces are exposed to
air and water and microbes. The question gardeners also have to
consider is, does "less toxic" make it a good thing to have
around? Sunlight and acid rain may act on the tire and cause it to
release more toxins. There are also variations in what is contained
in the tire based on the type of tire you use -- e.g. spare tires
don't have steel in them like steel belted radials, and one site
said summer tires are supposed to be more toxic than winter tires.
(Does that make winter tires safe? No explanation given.)
In terms of the effect on garden plants of shredded rubber and
mulch, the testers observed zinc leaching out of the tires and
chrysanthemums being affected by the initial leaching, which then
stopped during the rest of the testing period. Another report
described some toxicity to tomatoes from tires. The more acidic the
soil, the more the zinc in it was a toxicity issue for plants (the
acidic soil makes the zinc more available to the plants). Zinc is a
common urban heavy metal pollutant anyhow.
Are we getting more tire dust in the air around the gardens from
screeching tires and normal wear on pavements than from whole
tires? I don't know.
One Swedish report said that due to leachates from tires causing
damage to aquatic organisms, they saw a need to evaluate the
potential for environmental hazard to blown tires along their
roadways. They found the leachates that were created artificially
to simulate what might happen from tires near waterways to be far
more toxic to aquatic life than they had originally estimated.
Are tires less dangerous as whole tires in small numbers than in
landfills? I couldn't find any statements one way or another. They
make great rat habitat if they're just sitting around waiting to be
used, though.
The study by CAES above cost $2000 to do - not very much money. I
am puzzled that we have spent probably billions manufacturing these
tires, and yet it is so comparatively hard to find a study on their
safety or lack thereof.
One of the characteristics of the world we live in is that we have a
manufacturing approach that starts a product off either useful but
later useless (rather than neverendingly able to be used), and we
accept toxicity as a given in our environment, rather than trying to
design things that are not toxic and leave the world cleaner.
Final link is to Bill McDonough's book, Cradle to Cradle. It is not
an inexpensive paperback because he walks the talk -- it is printed
not on dead trees, but on an industrial chemical (polymer?) that
could be used for books and then the ink washed off and the pages
recycled to make more books from the same chemical mass - no trees
involved. The "paper" feels like vellum. I found the book's
rethinking of how we manufacture tremendously inspiring --and at
this moment of hesitation in our economy where things are not
working, perhaps it's time to invest in doing our industry
differently so that each product has the potential to make the world
cleaner, not dirtier, and stoically accepting that we are
manufacturing our own demise is not a personality characteristic
required of our kids or ourselves to live on the planet.
Here's the link to the amazon preview:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0865475873/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link
I
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