A muddy army of volunteers helps clean up Philly’s biggest tire dump

Wherever used tires are dumped by a waterway or piled high in urban dead-ends, look for Jon Merryman; he’ll be there.

Merryman, 62, drove 115 miles Saturday, from his home near Baltimore to Tacony Creek Park in the Crescentville section of Philadelphia, to participate in a major tire cleanup sponsored by the city and several nonprofits.

The disposal and recycling of used tires is a worldwide conundrum, and for Merryman, who is retired from Lockheed Martin, cleaning them up has become a bit of an obsession. He has visited over 2,000 counties in pursuit of them.

“I’d say I personally have handled about 10,000 tires,” he said.

It’s a mind-boggling number considering how daunting the 2,200 tires dumped near Tacony Creek looked Saturday. The pile was even larger when it was first discovered last year, a whopping 4,000-plus tires. It was still as high as 6 feet Saturday, snaking around like a dark, rubber river for about 100 feet before a crew of 200-plus volunteers, like Merryman, donned gloves and got to work.

“We’re gonna form a line, like a human chain,” one volunteer shouted on the steep, muddy terrain.

One by one, volunteers dug into the tire dump, sloshing stagnant water all over their pants and rolling the tires up a hill toward idling city sanitation trucks. Squirrels and chipmunks scattered out from underneath.

“It feels good to get dirty for a good cause,” said volunteer Desiree Riley, of the nonprofit Mastermind Cooperative. ”It shows we can be an army for good."

While Philly and other cities have been plagued with tire dumping for as long as there have been cars, nonprofits said the dump at Tacony Creek was the largest they had ever seen here.

Dumping the tires, cleanup leaders said, was far easier than the cleanup. The dump is downhill from a stone access road for SEPTA rail lines, which was gated and locked. Officials say the culprits actually replaced the lock with one of their own, drove to a high point, and simply dumped them from the back of a truck.

Shari Hersh, of the nonprofit Trash Academy, is disappointed the city did not catch the dumpers via camera systems. Officials believe a contractor likely opted to dump the tires illegally, rather than pay fees at a proper recycling or disposal facility.

“This is a business and it’s a huge exploitation. They made repeated trips here,” Hersh said. “The cameras did not prevent this.”

The city has installed more than 300 cameras in an effort to combat illegal dumping of tires and construction debris, with plans to add 100 more. Justin DiBerardinis, executive director of the nonprofit Tookany/Tacony-Frankford (TTF) Watershed Partnership, said he would like to see some more clandestine “trail-cam” cameras, often used by hunters, which can be attached to trees and camouflaged.

By 9:30 a.m., two human chains had formed, with hundreds of tires rolling along. Sometimes, a few slipped away.

“Tire rolling,” one man yelled.

Some industrious volunteers, like Merryman, got a workout in, hoofing the tires uphill by hand to the sanitation trucks.

“I won’t have to go cycling today,” said Bob Weinhold, whose daughter, Bailey Weinhold, helped organize the event for United by Blue, an outdoor brand.

Each sanitation truck could hold anywhere from 300 to 500 tires, a worker said. The tires would likely be heading to a waste processor in Conshohocken or the Covanta trash incinerator in Chester.

“It costs a lot of money and takes a lot of man-hours to do this, and there’s costs to getting rid of them, too,” said Maria Horowitz, a watershed manager for the Philadelphia Water Department.

Councilmember Anthony Phillips, who was on scene and rolling tires Saturday morning, said the city spent $48 million a year on cleanups, with the bulk of the money used for removal, not prevention.

The U.S. generates approximately 292 million “end-of-life tires” annually, with New Jersey having a higher number than most states. Tires can be recycled into asphalt or playground and sports equipment, and a tiny percentage have been used in alternative homes, like “Earthships.”

These unused tires often pile up in urban areas, posing a risk of fire that can release toxic smoke. A tire fire closed I-95 in Philadelphia in 1996. The tires can slowly leach chemicals into waterways as well and are notorious mosquito breeding sites.

Shredded tires have even been a fuel source, burned at high temperatures to produce power at cement plants, pulp and paper mills, and other facilities. The Environmental Protection Agency said that’s preferable to stockpiling them.

“It is better to recover the energy from a tire rather than landfill it,” the agency wrote.

By 10:30 a.m., a cheer rose up from the wet, muddy crowd as all the tires had been moved up the hill and sat, piled up, waiting for another truck. The crowds fanned out, but Merryman walked over to Snake Road, also in Tacony Creek Park, and found more tires.

“There’s always more tires,” he said.