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A Logan County man is hoping to bring a new way of disposing tires to Ohio, but has run into legal troubles in the process.
Logan County Health District’s environmental health director cited Rodney Burnside, of Huntsville, for the open dumping of solid waste, illegal disposition of construction and demolition debris and nuisance and health hazard.
Burnside has hundreds of thousands of tires at his business, Freedom Recovery and Recycling, 4971 County Road 130, and Kauffman said besides using a false permit to get the tires, Burnside is breaking health codes as well.
“We are cleaning up, and as you can see, we are trying to go by the regulations,” Burnside said Thursday.
The two main environmental concerns the largest tire dump in Logan County in 15 years presents are mosquitoes and fires, Kauffman said.
“Scrap tires provide an optimal breeding ground for mosquitoes,” Kauffman said. “Mosquitoes identified at tire piles in Ohio can carry St. Louis Encephalitis, La Crosse Encephalitis and West Nile Virus.”
He added that research shows disease-carrying mosquitoes prefer tires as breeding grounds.
Burnside said he is working to spray the tires to stop the breeding of mosquitoes.
The second main concern of fires stems from thousands of tires being so close together.
Ohio EPA requires piles of 500 tires be more than 56 feet apart from one another. Burnside currently has piles of thousands of tires running one into each other on the property.
“Tire fires are difficult for emergency crews to extinguish, and the pyrolysis runoff can cause ground water, surface water and soil contamination,” Kauffman said.
Burnside said Thursday he is working with the EPA right now to get his registrations straight, and the reason his yard was not up to standards is because he has been battling throat cancer.
He’s hoping to eventually start the first tire pyrolysis operation in Ohio. Tire pyrolysis is a method of disposing tires that heats the tires down into their raw materials.
“What we are trying to do is to make sure we are recycling the tires down to nothing, to where there are zero emissions,” Burnside said.
The method can produce oil, steel and carbon black.
Burnside said he hopes to sell those raw materials back to Honda suppliers.
“All the tires that come off a Honda will go back on Honda,” Burnside said.
“If this goes forward I would be excited about it. I think it is a great idea,” Kauffman said. “We would get rid of a lot scrap tires in a beneficial way.”
Burnside needs about $2 million to get the infrastructure to start the tire pyrolysis process and said he hopes to start the business so he can leave it for his son when he dies.
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