DENVER—Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper has signed a bill designed to clean up the state's 60 million-plus stockpiled scrap tires.
The bill, which Hickenlooper signed June 6, is the culmination of seven years of effort by the Rubber Manufacturers Association to enact legislation that would address Colorado's two tire monofills, the largest in the U.S.
“Colorado needs this legislation to end the stockpiling of waste tires, clean up the monofills and help establish new markets for discarded tires,” said RMA Vice President Michael Blumenthal, who led the effort to pass the bill.
The bipartisan bill establishes a plan for closing and cleaning up the monofills and ends an inefficient taxpayer-funded subsidy program to end-users of scrap tires.
The Colorado monofills comprise more than half of the estimated 100 million stockpiled waste tires left in the U.S., according to the RMA. In 1990, when the association began its scrap tire abatement efforts, more than 1 billion stockpiled scrap tires were in the U.S., the RMA said.