Every year, environmentalists rush to clean up hundreds of discarded tires that flow into southern San Diego County from Mexico through the Tijuana River. But whenever it rains, the tires pile up again.
A new binational collaboration led by the organization Wildcoast aims to stop the tires from washing into the U.S. The pilot program, which launched Thursday, aims to collect and shred up to 100,000 tires in Tijuana. The tires will be sold for reuse by a Mexican commodities company.
The initiative brings together government officials, business leaders and environmentalists from both sides of the border.
Serge Dedina, the mayor of Imperial Beach — where many of the car tires clog horse trails and pollute beaches — spoke at the inauguration of the project in Tijuana, saying the clean-up is more urgent than ever because of the growing Zika virus threat. He said the tires pose a public health hazard as well as an environmental problem.
“Now with the threat of Zika and things like yellow fever, we’ve got to clean up these waste tires because they’re perfect vectors for mosquitoes that spread Zika and yellow fever," Dedina said.
The launch of the project took place in Tijuana's Los Laureles canyon, where hundreds of low-income families use the tires as foundations for their makeshift homes. When it rains, mudslides push the tires straight into the Tijuana River, where gushing water carries the tires into a sensitive marsh in southern San Diego County, and eventually into the ocean.
The tires actually originate in California, which exports nearly three million used, unwanted tires to a secondary market in Tijuana every year as part of a state government waste recycling effort. Mexican consumers purchase the old tires for cheap, but they quickly deteriorate to the point of being unusable on the road, and are thrown away all over the city.
"We have a moral and ethical responsibility to work with Baja California and our friends in the private sector and civil society to find solutions and eliminate these vectors of disease such as Zika and yellow fever," Dedina said.
California's recycling agency CalRecycle is financing the project in collaboration with Baja California's environment ministry, a Tijuana waste collection company, the commodities company and Wildcoast.
“So the idea is to use some of those tire recycling funds to pick up tires and then get them recycled in Tijuana, so we don’t have to spend 10 times as much to pick up and recycle them in California," Dedina said.
The initiative will run through April 2017. If it proves effective, project leaders will seek funding to keep the project going long term.
