Pullman's Lot

Donald E. Pullman, a home-improvement contractor, is facing a herculean labor. In the dead of several nights, someone dumped some 8,000 worn-out automobile tires on his one-acre building lot in Herndon, Va., near the Fairfax-Loudoun county line. The authorities threatened Pullman with a jail sentence or a $300 fine for operating an illegal dump unless he quickly got rid of them.

Easy, thought Pullman at first. He would simply give them to Fairfax County for landfill. "We're all sympathy," said the county engineer. "But tires don't make good material. Unless they're chopped up, they keep coming to the surface after being buried." It just so happens that the county does not have a tire-shredding machine, and would charge Pullman 50-c- per tire to remove them or $4,000 for the lot.

Pullman soon grew desperate. He discovered that the county's air-quality laws forbid burning tires and that the "carcasses," as they are called, were much too old to give away to any tire-recapping firm. It occurred to him to pay the $300 fine and turn the tires over to the county. But the local judge has suspended the fine because the county does not know what to do with the tires either. "Everything I've looked into is illegal or expensive," sums up Pullman.

His only consolation to date is that he is not alone. According to the Institute of Solid Waste, there are about 200 million old tires lying around the U.S. countryside.

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