Ahh, economy, environment - where the two meet it's rarely pretty. After certain of their Ford Explorer tires were found to fall to shreds at high speed, Bridgestone/Firestone tire manufacturers had to recall 6.5 million of them. Obviously they're useless at fulfilling the purpose they were produced for. B/F can hardly abandon the tires by the old swimming hole either - 6.5 million would form a wall 50 feet high, 50 feet thick and half a mile long.* The tires need to become something else.

Here are a bunch of ways old (or new and useless) tires can be recycled:

• Shoes. Flip-flops, huraches, and the like. Bridgestone's recalls could make 100 million pairs - enough to shoe all the children in a third world country.
• Roads. Tires can be mulched and mixed with asphalt for high-quality pavement.
• Car parts. Rubber bumpers, for example. Snow mats and windshield wipers. Cupholders, too.
• Burn them! Seriously. "Of the 270 million tires scrapped each year in the United States, about 114 million are mixed with coal and used as fuel," according to the Scrap Tire Management Council.* I for one will never make that flippant remark about global warming again...
• Garden hoses - specifically, the black "soaker" hoses that have lots of little tiny leaks (holes) in them already.
• Playground mats. All of the recalled tires could be turned into 350 very large, thick playground mats. With a price tag of $2 million it's not bloody likely.

* "How to Make 200 Million Flip-Flops", The New York Times Week in Review p. 2, Sunday, August 27 2000

• My old High School had a track that was made completely out of ground-up tire fragments embedded in tar. We got excellent traction on it. I bet the price on such materials is going to drop soon.
• If you combine the shielding/shading properties of the inside of a tire with an area of moderate rainfall, you can make a pretty nifty mosquito habitat. Why would you want a lot of mosquitos?
  1. Old-style biological warfare.
  2. Help support a bird sanctuary.
• Forget splashdowns, we've got a new landing platform for future capsule spacecraft!