Tires to Top Landfill

Mesa County, CO, will be-in a sense--turning its landfill inside out. Rather than shredding discarded tires for disposal in its landfill, the county will be capping expired sections of its landfill with bales of compressed illegal discards.

The procedure is made possible by a grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA). The county will collect tires from illegal piles within its purview and have them baled. It would then use the bales directly-as for its landfill cap--or sell them for such construction as dams, erosion control, storage facilities, and escarpments.

The county proposed to the DOLA that it compress the tires into 2000-lb bales (consisting of about 100 tires each) and secure them with galvanized or stainless-steel banding.

The county plans to use the baled tires to cap a restructured section of its 160-acre landfill starting in the autumn of 1999. The landfill, which currently has a U.S.$18 per ton tipping fee, reportedly is being redesigned. After that, its life is expected to be another 60 years.