Illegal Tire Dumping

Bernalillo County, New Mexico, has accepted an additional $100,000 state grant to curb illegal tire dumping that has left roughly 123 tons of scrap tires piled across two sites on Albuquerque’s West Mesa.

The Recycling and Illegal Dumping (RAID) grant, issued by the New Mexico Environment Department’s Resource Recovery Bureau, will fund a public-information campaign teaching residents safe disposal methods, the environmental damage caused by improperly discarded tires, and the free Tire Amnesty Day events the county already runs every other weekend.

Why Illegal Tire Dumping Persists

County officials say most of the dumped tires come from semi trucks, whose steel-reinforced construction makes them hard to move and cut without the right equipment. Over the summer the county used an earlier grant to purchase a tire cutter, and the new funding shifts the effort from cleanup into prevention and public education.

The stakes go beyond litter. Resource Recovery Bureau outreach manager Levi Lementino noted that tires carry chemical components, including PFAS, and that their shape makes them a harborage for mosquitoes and other pests. He also pointed to the underlying structural problem: New Mexico has no facility that will process and shred tires back into raw material, so the tires must instead be hauled to Texas City, Texas, or Phoenix, Arizona.

Collection Is Only Half the Problem

That observation defines the real bottleneck. Amnesty events and education collect scrap tires, but without local processing capacity the collected tires still leave the state. As long as end-of-life tires lack a nearby destination, they keep finding their way into empty lots and open land.

The grant also funds education on single-use plastic bags and food containers, part of a broader push to keep recoverable materials out of the waste stream.

Learn More About Turning Scrap Tires Into Value

• Advanced Tire Pyrolysis Technology
• Recovered Carbon Black Production
• Turn-Key EPC Delivery
• Feasibility Studies

Partner With The KleanTeam to Build Local Tire Processing

Safe. Clean. Profitable. One Proven Partner.

Illegal dumping is what happens when a region has tires to collect but no plant to process them. Klean Industries builds the tire-pyrolysis and recovered-carbon-black facilities that give communities a local, profitable destination for end-of-life tires — turning scrap into recovered carbon black, pyrolysis oil and steel instead of an out-of-state haul.

Klean’s Key Advantages:

• ✅ Thirty-plus years engineering commercial tire and plastic pyrolysis plants.
• ✅ 8 recovered carbon black (rCB) facilities built in India over the past 2 years.
• ✅ Signed LOI to supply 5 more rCB plants in India.
• ✅ KBR added Klean’s proprietary TyreNova tire-pyrolysis technology to its IP portfolio.
• ✅ KleanLoop blockchain provides end-to-end scrap-tire feedstock traceability.

Ready to give your region’s scrap tires a local processing destination?

Speak with a Tire Pyrolysis Expert at Klean Industries » GO.