Florida Clears Artificial Reefs Of Tyres

When people began dumping used tyres in the ocean 40 years ago to create artificial reefs, they gave little thought to the potential environmental cost, or to how difficult it would be to pick them up.
Now, local authorities have started clearing some 700,000 tyres dumped off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, up the coast from Miami, US. A team of 40 divers from the U.S. Army, Navy and Coast Guard spent three weeks in June 2007, pulling up 10,373 sand-filled and slime-coated tyres from the ocean floor.
The military divers soon realised that they could strap together 50 to 70 tyres with wire cables and lift them to the surface with inflatable air bags, where a crane hauled the bundle from the water.
Millions of tyres, usually bundled with nylon straps or steel cables, were cast into the sea off Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and off the U.S. states of New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, California and Florida. The idea was to provide habitat for fish while disposing of trash from the land; but in the rugged and corrosive environment of the ocean, nylon straps wore out and snapped, cables rusted, and tyres broke free.
The tyres dumped off Fort Lauderdale posed a particular threat. When they broke free they migrated shoreward and ran into a living reef tract, climbing up its slope and killing everything in their path.
“If we can keep the project going we think they can get all the tires and then the reef can recover,” said Ken Banks of Broward County’s Environmental Protection Department. “But the reef recovery will probably take decades.”
The cleared tyres were trucked to a disposal plant in Georgia, where they were chipped into fuel for a waste recycling plant.