Weld County offers free tire disposal for residents this weekend

This weekend, Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment will host its first tire disposal event for Weld County residents to responsibly get rid of old tires for free.

The event will take place from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 3, at the Household Hazardous Waste (HHW) Center, 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley, according to a news release from Weld County.

A little over four years ago, Weld County suffered a monumental fire in Hudson, Colo. at Tire Mountain, a waste tire monofill. The fire departments used heavy equipment operators to create a berm of dirt around the tire fire for containment, and the approximately 7.5 acre fire burned for two days, according to The Denver Gazette’s news partners, 9NEWS.

Tire Mountain has since closed, and state law required that all waste tire monofills close by July 1, 2024.

Dan Parkos, the environmental health specialist for Weld County, said that the tire disposal event is unrelated to the 2020 fire, but that tire fires do present great hazards to public safety.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, tire fires are not only difficult to extinguish and expensive to clean up, but they can also pollute the air, soil, and water because tires break down into hazardous compounds including gases, heavy metals, and oil.

Old tires can also become breeding grounds for mosquitos. When sitting outside, tires often fill up with pools of water from the rain — which makes an ideal environment for mosquitoes to breed, said Parkos. Disposing the tires safely helps minimize breeding and diseases caused by mosquitoes and other pests.

As long as the tires are off-rim, participants can turn in up to four passenger car or light truck tires without charge, which will be accepted at the discretion of the HHW staff, said Jennifer Finch, a spokesperson for Weld County.

After residents drop the tires off, a third-party contractor paid for by the county’s solid waste fund will collect the tires and send them to a waste tire processor, who will shred the tires and recycle them for other uses such as treads for new tires, fuel, aggregate for mulch, and covers for landfills, Finch told the Denver Gazette in an email.

The county is hoping to reduce tire waste in the area by up to 2,000 tires if all of the drop-off time slots get filled, Finch added.

The event was limited only to residents of unincorporated Weld County at first, but now it is open to all county residents, said Parkos.

“We noticed that tires often end up in ditches along county roads, so this disposal event is an opportunity to clean up the rural area in our county, reduce the time that county workers have to clean up roads, and provide easier access to tire disposal,” he said.

For more information and to sign up for a drop-off time, visit weld.gov/go/hhw or call (970) 400-2217.