Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
ATWOOD - There's not a scrap of rubber at the former tire dumps in town at the former MK Metals site and just west of town on CR 200W in an old gravel pit.
For the last two years, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management supervised cleanup at the eight-acre site, removing more than 4.1 million tires.
Since the first complaints were filed in 1988, a number of actions were taken regarding these sites and others owned by Garry Baker, who operated G&M Recycling.
Tires also were stored in a chicken coop near CR 400N, in semi trailers parked at a private business and on city property in Warsaw.
A number of proposals were offered as solutions to cleaning up the dump including the 1995 establishment of Atwood Recycling Inc. The company was formed to chip the tires into bits for reuse in various products.
One year later the recycling company was disbanded due to disagreements between Baker and the company's owners.
In August 1996, IDEM decided to take charge of the massive cleanup, where piles of tires were stacked 80 feet high in some places.
The project was labeled an emergency cleanup in 1996. In January 1997, cleanup at the in-town location, where 400,000 tires were stored, began at a cost of $800,000.
The CR 200W dump posed a significant health and environmental threat to the area and its residents, according to IDEM reports. The tires provided an optimal breeding ground for mosquitoes and a habitat for pests.
The bulk of IDEM's cleanup efforts were paid through the Waste Tire Fund, created by the state Legislature in 1992. The law requires 25 cents from the sale of every new tire in the state be deposited in the fund.
Nearly six million waste tires per year are thrown away in the state and the majority of those are not being disposed of properly. Historically this has not always been true. Over the last six years, more than 6.4 million tires have been cleaned up at illegal Indiana dump sites. The Kosciusko County site contained the majority of those tires.
The tires, processed into chips, are being used in municipal landfills as daily cover.
