Thursday: drive out to Bomgaars to fetch paper and a mixed bag of bottles and cans. Friday: run over to Northwest Community Action Partnership and change out their white container. Almost every day at Keep Alliance Beautiful takes us across town on Third Street. Our town’s main thoroughfare can become a blur of businesses seen thousands of times, but the fun is noticing changes. Kaiser Tire’s ever-growing pile is a subtle marker of time and, like sand in an hourglass, there are rare days when the tires have vanished.
After writing about Alliance’s tire amnesty day last year, I assumed local shops paid for the same service. However, until this past August, I had never seen a pick up first hand. On that particular bright summer morning KAB was running on heat schedule. I was headed east (back to the recycling center) and noticed a white semi tractor and open-topped trailer parked at Kaiser. With my camera back in the office, I parked and took a few shots on my phone of the man loading tires. He sat on a seat behind the cab swiveling, grabbing and depositing black rings from the end of a hydraulic claw and boom. Pluck and drop, pluck and drop . . . three car tires then a tractor tire. The driver from Resource Management in Brownell, Kansas, removed a mound accumulated over weeks within hours.
How many people who buy new tires keep the worn ones? The majority pay the disposal fee helping offset the shop’s cost for recycling. Tires can be valuable to reuse in certain cases. At our house, three went into a tower for the kids a few years ago with used windows on another four to start seeds in the garden. Of course there are tire swings and walls at go kart tracks. A family on the way to Scottsbluff painted a tractor tire as a decoration for holidays. If the tread and rubber are still decent the best of a set could be mounted for a spare.
Originally located on Second Street in Alliance, Bob Kaiser has been in business for 10 years. Demand has grown, though “It doesn’t matter what place you have it’s never big enough,” he said. There are two employees and Bob’s brother Anthony owns the Kaiser service truck.
Since laws have changed, Bob explained you really can’t do anything with tires anymore except find an outlet to recycle them. He said the truck from Resource Management comes about every six weeks. Usually everything fits in one load though on occasion it takes two trips. From Aug. 9 to when we talked last week, Bob said the count was up to 1,131 tires for the next load. From February to August 2022, Kaiser counted 3,702 tires. The Kansas company mulches then stores the loads for marketing in the recycling stream. Bob mentioned highway paving as one use.
Though the pile outside is Kaiser’s most visible commitment to recycling, the business works with KAB and other outlets on about everything else. A few years ago we provided containers for plastic (oil jugs, etc.) and cardboard/paperboard. They also gather plastic for the Hefty orange bag program. “Usually people come get oil,” for their shop heaters, Bob said. They also recycle small items like valve stems and wheel weights as well as scrap metal, he said.
Kaiser Tire has no specific plans yet for other environmentally friendly practices in the future, though Bob maintains an attitude of “that’s what you do” when it comes to recycling.
