JARED SOARES The Roanoke Times

A worker for Remac, a hazardous waste removal company based in Maryland, throws a tire in the back of a truck during a March cleanup of a tire pile at the site of an old junkyard in Axton, in Henry County. About 20,000 tires were removed from the 16-acre site.

JARED SOARES The Roanoke Times

Don Gravely, owner of the property where these tires were collected in March for recycling, said the tires have been there a long time. "I'm 45, and they've been here as long as I can remember," he said.

If all goes well, Allan Lassiter will work himself out of a job in about three years.

It'll be a feat. It means the Virginia Waste Tire Program will have erased every one of 1,200 piles of scrap tires it has identified in the state. That's 25 million eyesore tires that can breed mosquitoes, catch fire and boil into gallons of hazardous waste.

The program announced a major milestone last month. All 185 known piles containing a total of 2 million tires in the Roanoke region have been cleaned up, either by the state or landowners.

When the whole state is done, it will mean chthe last vestiges of the way old tires were scrapped in the days before recycling will be gone, and the program, which deals exclusively with piles that date back to those days, will be out of work.

That mainly means Lassiter, 59, the only manager the program has ever had.

Lassiter said he is glad to work on a program that actually has money to really be successful.

That wasn't always the case, but it changed after a key 2002 event in this region: A teen set fire to a pile of 3 million tires in Roanoke County.

The fire burned for a month, and threw both light and heat on the need to better fund the tire pile program so such fires can't happen again.

Flames bring change

These days, when you buy new tires, you pay a recycling fee per tire and your old rubber hits the road to a recycling plant.

In the old days, the tires just got piled up. Lassiter said that was partly born of a belief that the petroleum in them could be extracted one day at great value. It never was, and the result was piles of tires all over the countryside.

That all changed after a single catastrophic event. A pile of 9 million tires in Winchester caught fire in 1983. Firefighters poured millions of gallons of water on it, Lassiter said, which produced millions of gallons of hazardous waste runoff and created an environmental hazard that took 17 years to clean up.

That fire was "the catalyst of tire recycling in America," he said.

Virginia's program got started in 1993 after identifying some 750 tire piles in the state. Lassiter took the helm.

He rejects the tag of "environmentalist" because of its political baggage.

Yet he will identify himself as a "long-time bureaucrat." He makes $73,000 a year.

His appearance -- he still sports the longish hair of his 1970s coming-of-age -- doesn't exactly suggest that label, but his resume does.

The Virginia Tech engineering graduate and Southampton County native had worked in the state transportation department, and then the Virginia Division of Energy in a conservation program before joining the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality in 1989.

Four years later, he became Virginia's first and only tire pile czar.

With funding from the 50-cents-per-tire recycling fee, the program chugged along on its mission to clean up tire piles created before recycling.

But between the continual discovery of more piles and an inadequate funding flow, the list of piles never seemed to get shorter. Even now, 15 to 20 new piles a year are discovered.

In a 2007 report to the Virginia General Assembly, the DEQ estimated it would take 20 years for the program to complete its work.

Things began to accelerate in 2002, when the fire occurred in South Roanoke County. A pile of 3 million tires off Starlight Lane went up in flames on a Saturday afternoon. Ironically, Lassiter's program had just made a grant to Roanoke County to get the pile cleaned up, and county officials were days away from executing an engineering contract to get the work under way.

The next year, in response to the Roanoke County fire, the General Assembly doubled that tire recycling fee from 50 cents to $1 per tire. In 2008, the legislature extended that fee increase through 2011 -- long enough to produce funding to cut that 20-year estimate down to a few years.

Sometimes a profit

To date, Lassiter said, the program has cleaned up 433 piles containing 21.5 million tires at a cost of $21 million.

The last significant tire pile in the Roanoke region lay on a rural 16-acre parcel in Axton, in Henry County.

With the cleanup going on, the DEQ called a news conference last month to announce its work was nearly done in the area.

A small front-end loader scooped up a dozen or more tires at a time, shook them to drain the rainwater, and dumped them into trucks to be hauled off to a recycling plant in Appomattox.

Don Gravely, the property owner, watched as what wound up being a two-year process came close to its end.

The land had been the site of an old junkyard his father operated, and the 20,000 or so tires there were the last remnants.

"I'm 45, and they've been here as long as I can remember," Gravely said.

The cleanup began with an anonymous letter to the DEQ. Lassiter came to Gravely and made an offer, Gravely said. If Gravely removed the rims from the tires at his own cost and piled the tires up, the DEQ would haul them away.

"It was a lot of work for me and it took a lot of time from my business," Gravely said. "I quit counting at $10,000 figuring my part."

He did recoup some of his costs from selling the rims for scrap. Gravely said he will probably put the land up for sale.

Lassiter figures that even with his costs, Gravely will make a profit.

"Every place we've cleaned up, the property has been improved," Lassiter said. "Sometimes the people make a profit, sometimes they don't."

One shining example of making a profit happened off Shenandoah Avenue in Roanoke.

Joseph Lohkamp owned a warehouse and some land on Baker Street that was littered with not only tires, but old gas tanks and other car parts, and even a boat. Some of the debris was on a city-owned unused right of way for a street or alley.

Lohkamp contacted Lassiter about it. "Of course, he knew exactly where it was," Lohkamp said.

Lassiter told him if he would haul the tires out to one location and pull the rims out, the state would haul them away. Lohkamp said he and RADAR, the transportation company which also owned some of the littered land, split their part of the cleanup, about $5,000.

In return, the city vacated the right of way and transferred the land to Lohkamp for nothing.

"If he didn't pull [the tires] out, and we didn't take care of them, they would still be sitting there as a blight on your community," Lassiter said.

Then, another adjoining land owner made Lohkamp "an offer I couldn't refuse." He wasn't specific, and city real estate records don't yet reflect the sale, but Lohkamp said he made a profit he would not have made if the land hadn't been cleaned up.

"The state did a great job with me," he said.

Where the old tires go

What becomes of the tires?

Virginia produces 8 million to 10 million scrap tires a year, including those cleaned up by the tire program.

According to Lassiter, most are recycled as fuel to be burned with coal -- the cheapest form of recycling.

The Cogentrix power plant in Richmond, for example, could by itself burn half of the recycled tires produced in Virginia annually, Lassiter estimated.

The plant, which has been burning tires since 1999, actually doesn't get much of the tire it supplements its coal supplies with from Virginia, though it does get some here, company spokesman Ed Canaday said.

He estimated about 4 percent of the fuel burned by the plant annually is scrap tires, and could be higher but for a lack of supply. The tires are cheaper than coal, and have a higher BTU rating.

Landfills, such as the one in Bristol, use scrap tire for a drainage layer below the trash, and mix it with soil and fly ash to use as cover.

Bristol initially used tires the landfill had accumulated and ground them up with their own machinery, said Mark Campbell, environmental and safety compliance officer.

But because of the cost and issues with the machinery, the landfill now contracts with a Concord, N.C., company, U.S. Tire, for its tire recycling.

Tires also wind up as mulch or rubber mats on playgrounds, and as those black rubber crumbs in artificial turf athletic fields.

And a few states recycle scrap tires into asphalt -- Florida, Texas and Arizona. Lassiter said that practice never caught on here because the recycled rubber costs more than the asphalt.

Wherever the tires go, it's an improvement over the old days, Lassiter said.

Lassiter acknowledges that there are waste cleanup programs in Virginia that don't have enough money to really get anything done.

"The tire program is always the one that had resources to actually go out and do stuff," he said.

And if that means he's working himself into retirement, he's fine with that.

In 1990, Lassiter said, the DEQ figured about 5 percent of tires were recycled in Virginia. The rest went into landfills and into other places where people are still finding them. Today, 95 percent are recycled.

"Talk about satisfying," Lassiter said. "That's very satisfying."