CENTERVILLE —

Covered in mud and sweating profusely, 375 students from PENNCREST School District demonstrated their commitment to the environment Wednesday by dragging 9,000 waste tires up the banks of a ravine and loading them into tractor trailers for recycling.

Getting out of school for half of the day was an added bonus.

“It’s just a really great way to spend the day,” said Dillon Holder, 15, of Cambridge

Springs High School. “I’ve never volunteered for a community service project before, but knowing what tires do to the environment makes the hard work worthwhile.”

It was the third time students joined for the tire reclamation project, but even after four more tractor-trailer loads were hauled out Wednesday, enough remained in the trenches of the headwaters of Oil Creek for one more waste removal session.

Students began several years ago, initiated by Maplewood High School students and developed into an interactive learning experience. Former Maplewood High School senior Nathan Renaudin and his biology teacher, Jason Drake, initiated the community effort with seniors Samantha Taylor, Kevin Sawatsky and Case Kunick.

Drake has kept the project alive with funding provided by the Milken Family Foundation as a way of teaching kids the vital roles they play in society.

“It is important to provide opportunities for young people to give back to their community and to ‘walk the walk’ and not just ‘talk the talk,’” he said. “These days we hear lots of talk about ‘change,’ but we are interested in actually implementing change through our understanding of science; we are recognizing a problem and creating solutions.”

The “monumental recycling project” has become an integral portion of the environmental science curriculum at Maplewood, Cambridge Springs and Saeger-town high schools because it exemplifies many environmental and health concerns facing our planet and “fits perfectly with our Pennsylvania science and technology and even more so with our Pennsylvania environment and ecology standards.”

Drake said there have been three tire reclamation efforts, but the “solid waste issue” has been a topic of discussion for at least five years and has been a catalyst for debate and discussion. Maplewood High School hosted a forum several years ago that featured experts who shed light on the breadth of the waste tire problem, as well as the impact on the surrounding environment.

Tires that aren’t properly disposed of pose a variety of health and environmental concerns, said Mariah Kinney, 16, of Maplewood High School.

“Not only can toxins be released into the air if these tires were to catch on fire, but the chemicals could seep into the ground and affect the water supply,” Kinney said. “Other dangers from tire dumps are that they are breeding grounds for rodents and mosquitos that can carry and transmit West Nile Virus.”

Students in a 50-foot-long chain passed tires from the bottom of the creek bed to students in the back of a tractor trailer who stacked them in a woven pattern. There were four trucks, each with a 1,500-tire capacity.

Mike Shaffer, the director of sales at Liberty Tire Co. in Pittsburgh, said he’s been in the tire recycling business for 16 years, but it was the first time he’s ever seen “this many kids working so hard and getting down and dirty” in a filthy tire dump.

“It’s incredible — absolutely incredible,” he said. “I’ve seen groups of people working together before, but usually there’s only a handful of kids in the crowd. It’s a really, really great thing that they’re doing for the environment here.”

Shaffer is coordinating the transportation of the tires to a cryogenic recycling plant in Braddock, where they will be sorted. Not all of the tires collected will be suitable for recycling, he said. About 5 percent of the 140 million tires that Liberty Tire collects each year are used for tire-derived fuel, which, when mixed with coal and wood, burns twice and long and twice as hot as coal, but with less emissions. Some of the tires — the worst of the worst — cannot be recycled or even used for TDF.

“Tires that are beyond our cleaning abilities, are contaminated or are odd sizes such as off-road, airplane or tractor tires, will end up in a monofill, which is a specially designed landfill consisting solely of tires,” he said. “They are buried, but are accessible in the future when we develop the capabilities to process them.”

Funding by the Milken Family Foundation will be used to pay for processing the tires, Shaffer said. Liberty Tires is providing transportation free of charge.

After three hours, students who participated in the clean-up project were tired, filthy dirty and smelled like the stagnant water trapped inside the tires. As they boarded the buses to return to their schools and then head home, Kinney called it “fun,” but said many parents, including her own, would probably opt to burn the clothes in lieu of washing them.

“It was a good time and I got to meet a lot of new people from other schools in our district,” she said. “It was like getting out of school for a field trip, only better because we actually did something to help out the environment.”



Penni Schaefer can be reached at 724-6370 or by e-mail at pschaefer@meadvilletribune.com.