For years, shipping containers that carried goods from China came back loaded with our scrap, because an empty return trip was cheaper to fill than to run empty. Same logic, closer to home: trucks and trailers already head out from the city to rural areas every day. Load the return leg with scrap tires, and deliver them to people who can pack them with dirt and turn them into retaining walls, sheds, root cellars, and homes.
Figures: USTMA 2023 end-of-life tire report; tire-bale and rammed-tire weights from builder accounts. See sources on the opportunity page.
An illegally dumped tire in an alley or a vacant lot holds rainwater and breeds mosquitoes, burns hot and toxic if it catches, and costs the city money to pick up. The fewer of them sitting in dense neighborhoods, the better — no matter where they end up.
Plenty of trucks run from the city out to farm towns and come back, or go out loaded and come back empty. Filling an empty leg with tires costs little more than the fuel already being burned. That's the whole China-container trick, on a regional scale.
Satellite internet like Starlink and remote work mean you no longer have to live near an office to earn a living. Homesteaders and off-grid builders want cheap, heavy, durable material — and a dirt-packed tire is exactly that.
Fewer dumped tires in alleys and lots, fewer mosquito breeding spots, less fire risk, and less money spent on cleanup crews. Tire shops get another outlet besides paying a hauler to take them to a shredder or a kiln.
Free or near-free structural material delivered to the land. The other ingredient — dirt — is already there. A retaining wall, a bermed shed, or a root cellar mostly costs sweat instead of cash.
Paid for a leg they were going to drive anyway — once by whoever is getting rid of the tires, and potentially again by whoever receives them.
A tire rammed into a wall and buried under earth isn't burned for fuel or ground up with more energy. It becomes thermal mass that holds a building's temperature for decades.
Architect Michael Reynolds started building "Earthships" near Taos, New Mexico in the 1970s: off-grid homes whose outer walls are stacks of tires rammed full of dirt, backed by earth, with rainwater catchment, solar power, and indoor greenhouses. He spent years fighting for permits to build with unconventional material — which is part of the lesson here too. This project isn't about only full Earthships; it's about moving the raw material to where people can use it for anything from a garden terrace to a house.