In some Michigan communities, burning tires are keeping the lights on.

Power plants in cities such as Wyandotte and Grayling burn millions of tires each year to make electricity, with operators saying that tire-derived power is cheaper and cleaner than burning coal or wood alone. And by burning tire shreds, the plants say they are keeping tires out of landfills and helping the state clean up decades’ worth of dump sites.

But residents who live in towns with tire-burning power plants have challenged them because of pollution concerns. Scientists have said that government standards are too low and power plant equipment is inefficient. And city officials in Detroit, for instance, say that illegally run tire stores hoping to cash in are one of the biggest contributors to the city’s blight.

Nonetheless, Michigan officials say they believe the 1991 legislation that gave them the power to regulate and remediate used tires has fueled an economy centered on tire reuse and recycling. The programs, said state environmental officials, have helped eradicate tire piles that were all but waiting to catch fire.

Michigan Department of Environmental Quality data suggest that over 20 years, about 31 million discarded tires have been reduced to 2 million and more than 200 known illegal tire dump sites have been reduced to 55. Tire-derived fuel – the shredded bits of tire that are mixed with coal and wood to create electricity – is the single largest use of old tires in Michigan.

“We have all these piles of tires and they are looking for any use they can get because you can only do so much with tires,” said Neil Taratuta, supervisor of the tire- and wood-burning Viking Energy plant in Lincoln, a village in Alcona County, about the state’s scrap tire programs.

Wyandotte’s municipal power plant creates electricity for about 10,000 households and 3,000 businesses, including Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital and BASF. Two boilers run off natural gas and the third uses tire shreds and coal, a practice the city started in 1998.

“We burn about 300 tons of fuel per day in this boiler. It generates less waste, lower emissions and more-efficient combustion,” said James French, the former director of the city’s power supply.

He said tires contain more energy than coal, pound-for-pound, and while creating the same sorts of emissions as coal, tires create less. The city’s shredded tire supply comes from Silver Lining Tire Recycling, also in Wyandotte.

The MDEQ requires that Wyandotte’s plant and all others track and report what goes into the boilers and what comes out of the smokestacks. Large-scale reports are due once per year. Continuous emission reports are due every quarter.

Steve Weis, environmental engineer for MDEQ in Detroit, said the state tests smokestacks at least once every five years. The amount of pollution that power plants release is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Most things are going to be cleaner when compared to coal in terms of pollutants,” Weis said, which is why the eight power plants that do so like burning tires.

On a recent morning, Detroit city code inspectors raided illegal businesses, including Tire King on Livernois and Davison. Hundreds of tires were piled behind a fence, covered in snow. More were stacked on top of the bright yellow building, creating the kind of fire hazard that Rhonda Oyer, chief of sustainable materials management at the MDEQ, said is common in scrap tire dealings.

Tire King had no license and was operating on property not zoned for tire-related businesses, said Glenn Davis, acting chief of the property management division of Detroit’s Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environment Department. The tires were supposed to be removed by a licensed hauler.

“They’re using it 100% for used tires,” Davis said. “It is one of our major concerns because of the dumping, because of the blight that it brings out in the neighborhood.”

Oyer said the businesses move around frequently. Davis said the operators of Tire King had within a month moved their business to Plymouth Road and that the city had plans to shut them down again.

In Hillman, a village in Alpena and Montmorency counties, the elementary school is right next to the power plant. In 2002, when plant officials applied to increase their use of tires, people like Donna Baranyai, with two children at the school, asked that the application be rejected. She eventually moved her children to a school in a neighboring community.

“It still concerns me,” Baranyai said. “There’s a community park at the end of the street. There are times when you go there and the playground equipment will be all covered in black.”

Similarly, in McBain, in Missaukee County, many members of the community were concerned even after air testing showed the plant to be operating under federal guidelines, said former resident Marilyn Visser.

As tires burn, they release compounds similar to coal – carbon carcinogens such as benzene, said Neil Carman, a former air quality inspector for Texas who is now with the Sierra Club. He said that power plants operate with old technology not optimized to burn anything well, let alone tires. So, even if power plant operators are meeting federal guidelines and can say that tires burn cleaner than coal, it’s still too dirty to be considered safe.

“The EPA needs to change its daily standards,” Carman said. “Tires are a dirty fuel.”

Both French and Taratuta said their plants did dry runs to test emissions and are aware of burning at the optimum temperature of their equipment to keep carbon monoxide under control and atmospheric nitrogen from suddenly becoming a pollutant.

Mike Reid of L’Anse Warden Electric in White Pine, in the Upper Peninsula’s Ontonagon County, said his company’s goal is to have 80% of its fuel be material that would otherwise end up in a landfill. They use waste wood and tires from throughout the Midwest.

“I think there is this vision that tires create pollution. We felt it was a good thing,” Reid said.