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May 5, 2008 --Making trash go away is a significant problem worldwide, and of the more challenging materials to dispose of properly is rubber tires. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that over 290 million scrap tires are generated in the U.S. annually. Placing them in landfills with other types of waste has been problematic as they have a tendency to rise to the surface, and when they do, hold water and provide a perfect breeding ground for disease carrying mosquitos. Sequestering them in dump-sites specifically for tires can lead to catastrophe if they ignite. Tires burn slowly, and can be very hard to extinguish. Tire piles can burn for months, sending harmful toxins into the air and the surrounding soil.

So how does a pile of 3 million tires outside of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico have 85% of it's content originating from the United States? Desponchadoras. Desponchadoras are small Mexican shops that buy used tires from all over the U.S. in bulk. They recondition the treads (in some cases) then re-sell them on both sides of the border at a price far lower than a set of new tires. Juarez alone has 350 desponchadoras. In recent years the city has gone to great lengths to regulate these buisnesses. Prior to this, the shops would dump their tires in illegal sites found all over the city. Now, the city mandates that for every tire imported from the U.S., one must also go to the municipal dump on the far south side of the city.

Due to the inordinate amount of scrap tire piles along the U.S.–Mexico border, the EPA and SEMARNAT (México’s environment and natural resource protection agency) recently established a joint initiative to identify and remove scrap tire piles. As of December 2005, the EPA reported that over two million tires had been removed from five border region waste sites. Given accelerating population rates in the border region and the hazards posed by discarded tires, local environmentalists are also paying closer attention to the number of regional scrap tire piles that exist.

Some commercial industries have also become involved in discovering uses for the otherwise useless tires. At the Juarez site, a local cement factory is the primary means of diminishing the pile. The tires are shredded and burned to provide fuel for the energy-hungry process of making cement.

Counting the number of tires bound for the cement factory provides an interesting, if crude, barometer for the U.S. economy. In times of economic strength, U.S. demand for cement rises and as a result, a greater number of tires leave the Juarez tire dump for the cement factory that frequently sends its finished product north. Reciprocally, when the U.S. economy lags, local demand for tire-derived fuel diminishes and the tires simply accumulate at the Ciudad Juarez tire dump.