Memorandum #05-10: PDF 13MB Adoption of the Proposed Regulations Governing the Management of Waste Tires
Chair Giunchigliani declared the public hearing open.
The following is a verbatim transcription of the public hearing concerning Memorandum #05-10.
Scott Weiss: Memorandum #05-10 is adoption of the Proposed Regulations Governing the Management of Waste Tires. Dennis Campbell, solid waste and compliance manager and Ed Wynder, acting supervisor will be presenting on this item.
Ed Wynder: I’ve apparently been promoted as well.
Chair Giunchigliani: Your check’s in the mail, too.
Dr. Sands: Scott’s being generous today. I just wanted to make a comment. I just want to commend staff for their work here on the waste tire regulations. As you’ll see by their presentation there’s quite a lot of intricacies and controversies with… (attachment #2 PDF 250KB)
Chair Giunchigliani: 254 pages…
Dr. Sands: …legislation. But a lot of discussion…actually if you remember this was actually scheduled for this past December…
Chair Giunchigliani: Right.
Dr. Sands: …because of feedback that we got from many stakeholders that we held it and went back to make some revisions and get more information in working with Senator Copening, who was involved with the legislation. So I just, again, want to commend staff for their efforts to put together a package that has some very difficult issues to address.
Chair Giunchigliani: Thank you. Good morning.
Dennis Campbell: Good morning, Madam Chair. Dennis Campbell, solid waste and compliance environmental health manager. And to my right is Ed Wynder, he’s my environmental health specialist and Mr. Wynder has been living and breathing waste tires since last May. So he’s our resident expert on waste tires at the moment. Anyway the purpose of us coming forward this morning is to propose…bring forward the proposed regulations for the management of waste tires. Back in May…on May 28, 2009 the legislature enacted SB186, which essentially dealt with the management of waste tires. One of the first things that was, when the bill was going through the legislature it was approved unanimously by the Senate and then approved by the Assembly in a 29-12 vote, and again it was signed by Governor Gibbons on May 28, 2009. And it actually became effective October 1, 2009. So, and essentially this bill is significant in that it is the first piece of legislation in the state of Nevada that bans a recyclable material (i.e. waste tires) from municipal solid waste landfills in Nevada. And I would like the Board to keep in mind that it’s municipal solid waste landfills, and we’ll be getting into the difference in just a minute. Again, the Senate Bill bans the disposal of passenger car tires in landfills that accept municipal solid waste. There…in the state of Nevada there are three types of landfills. Class I, Class II and Class III landfills. Municipal solid waste landfills are the Class I and Class II landfills; Class III landfills accept industrial solid waste. This particular ban in Clark County would affect these municipal solid waste landfills: Apex, Boulder City, Laughlin and Mesquite. In Mesquite…Mesquite’s landfill is actually in Lincoln County…
Chair Giunchigliani: Mm-hmm.
Mr. Campbell: …so we have no jurisdiction over the landfill. However per the Senate Bill if there is a facility permitted to manage waste tires in the county, then no tire generated within the county can be deposited in a municipal solid waste landfill.
Chair Giunchigliani: Regardless of where that is.
Mr. Campbell: Yeah. OK.
Chair Giunchigliani: Class III you said was solid waste?
Mr. Campbell: Yeah, in effect. The Class III landfills, those tend to be industrial solid waste landfills. And generally speaking in Clark County the Class III landfills are site specific. In other words, and we have an example…Wells Cargo. They’re only permitted to accept certain types of waste, generally waste that’s generated on their facility, or they can accept waste. And in Wells Cargo’s case they are not permitted currently to accept waste tires. Now there is a Class III facility in Lincoln County, which again we have no jurisdiction over, but it is a Class III landfill but it has been permitted by Nevada Division of Environmental Protection to accept waste tires. So you need to keep that in mind as well.
Member Jones: But could not accept tires that were generated in Clark County?
Mr. Campbell: No, and we’ll be getting into that in just a minute. OK? The Senate Bill 186 specifies that the solid waste management authority for Clark County must adopt regulations governing the management of waste tires in a timely manner. We’ve been working on this since last May when the bill was actually enacted and we’ve been attempting to balance, maintain consistency with what’s specified in the bill and we’ve been given a lot of comments and we’ll be going into that in a few minutes. The second thing on this in the Senate Bill was the willful disposal of waste tire in a municipal solid waste landfill is now considered a misdemeanor and that was just codified last month per NRS 444.509. And anybody that is willfully depositing a waste tire in a landfill is guilty of a misdemeanor and there is a $100 penalty per tire. So if you had four tires and you put it in a landfill, that’s a $400 penalty, minimum. So, OK. The next thing I want to point out is our regulations must prohibit landfilling of passenger car tires in municipal solid waste landfills by new tire retailers and wholesalers. It also, the regulations must allow for the creation of a program to promote tire recycling and reuse. We have to provide acceptable disposal alternative to municipal solid waste landfills and the regulations must allow for the inspection of the facilities for management of waste tires. OK. Another provision in the Senate Bill was that a facility permitted for the management of a waste tire cannot refuse to accept a waste tire unless the facility has not received payment for the disposal of that – that’s the only condition that they can reject a waste tire at their facility. There’s also the requirement to establish…there are requirements that need to be established for transportation and storage of waste tires. OK. Also in one of the provisions of the Senate Bill was that we had to allow for exemptions or waivers from the requirements of the regulations and we’ll be going into that as well. And there’s also an exemption from the unintentional or inadvertent disposal of waste tires. In other words, somebody happens to slip one into a dumpster and nobody knows it’s there, that’s what we would consider unintentional or inadvertent. And by…
Chair Giunchigliani: And not the person picking it up…
Mr. Campbell: …by, right, the company picking it up, that’s correct.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK.
Mr. Campbell: Sorry about that. OK. Also a key provision of the Senate Bill said that the regulations completed, for Clark County, could not prohibit the lawful disposal of a waste tire outside of Clark County. In other words, if a jurisdiction outside of Clark County permits the disposal of waste tires in one of their facilities, be it a landfill, a recycling center, whatever it is, our regulations can only focus on what happens within Clark County. So if somebody, if…and we go back to using…
Chair Giunchigliani: Mesquite.
Mr. Campbell: Well, Western Elite’s plant, class III landfill in Lincoln County, because it is permitted by another jurisdiction to accept waste tires our regulations cannot, according to the Senate Bill, interfere with the disposal of those tires.
Chair Giunchigliani: The state would have to…does NDEP have to adopt regs, too, though to implement or only the health districts?
Mr. Campbell: According to the Senate Bill, the only time regulations have to be adopted for management of waste tires is when a facility is permitted or is going to be permitted within our jurisdiction…
Chair Giunchigliani: OK.
Mr. Campbell: …and currently within Clark County we have two facilities that have received permits for management of waste tires…
Chair Giunchigliani: And those are?
Mr. Campbell: Phoenix Industries and, I believe, Lunas…
Chair Giunchigliani: Lunas we did at the last Board meeting…
Mr. Campbell: That’s correct. So, OK. Another section of the bill provides for penalties for violations of the regulations, which we have, are pretty much standard for what we currently have. The other thing that we want to point is, and I want to make it very clear, is we…our regulations have to be at least consistent with what was in the Senate Bill and we attempted to do what…through a number, you have 255 pages of comments and materials that we’ve been provided so we attempted with these regulations to maintain kind of that center-point because of all the comments we’ve been given. So, and so with that, I’m going to turn the presentation over to Mr. Wynder, as I mentioned previously, he’s been living and breathing this and he was the principle author of the draft regulations that you have before you today. So…
Chair Giunchigliani: Thank you.
Mr. Wynder: Thank you, Dennis. Madam Chair, members of the Board, thank you for your time today. In your memo in your packet there is a revision of the proposed regulations from the 17th of this month. After that memo was put together we received some comments where a member of industry wanted some clarification; staff felt that it was appropriate and so there is a later version with two changes that are just clarifications which make clear that junk vehicle tires are exempted from the landfilling ban and that waste tire and waste tire materials have to be transferred either to a permitted disposal site or used properly.
Chair Giunchigliani: Can you state that again…so junk vehicle tires…
Mr. Wynder: Junk vehicle tires…
Chair Giunchigliani: …are not tires?
Mr. Wynder: …a junk vehicle is a term in the NACs, but they prefer to use the term “end-of-life vehicle” but…
Chair Giunchigliani: I have two in my garage.
Mr. Wynder: …in discussions with Senator Copening she expressed to staff that it was her intent to exempt end-of-life vehicles from this provision and accordingly at her request we have put that into these proposed regulations.
Chair Giunchigliani: And the purpose of that is…
Mr. Wynder: The purpose was because of the burden that would be upon the end-of-life vehicle industry to go through the process of…
Chair Giunchigliani: Removing…
Mr. Wynder: …removing all those tires.
Chair Giunchigliani: So if they crush a car, or a truck, they take it into a junk yard, they sort out all the materials they can, then crush it, the tires are generally still on it, is that what…
Mr. Wynder: Yes, that’s correct.
Chair Giunchigliani: And then that can still be transported to landfill, but would not be impacted by this because that ban was on the car as a whole.
Mr. Wynder: Well it could theoretically be transferred to a landfill; however those cars are generally shipped, if not all, completely shipped to recyclers and they’re recycled mostly in county, but also out of county as well.
Chair Giunchigliani: Ah, another potential manufacturing plant. So they do ship the scrap metal…just call it then scrap metal at that point, is that…
Mr. Wynder: At that point it would be called scrap metal and the shredding, or the recycling of end-of-life vehicles has been going on in Clark County for quite some time and is a well-established industry and the concern was not only taking these tires off but also the recycling process separates the metal from the residuals that can be recycled, except at great cost.
Chair Giunchigliani: Once they’ve delivered…
Mr. Wynder: Exactly.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK. It still at least gets reused and hopefully doesn’t go to a landfill, but we don’t know that for sure.
Mr. Wynder: Well, as a matter of practice it does go into the landfill and, again, the justification was expressed, or the reasoning that was expressed to staff was that the burden in removing the tires from those vehicles was so great as to justify an exemption within these regulations, and that was their intent in asking for that.
Member Jones: How many of those tires exist versus all other tires that need to be recycled? That 10%, 50%?
Mr. Wynder: That’s an excellent question. I could get back to you on that. My ballpark figure would be 5%, but please don’t hold me to that.
Member Eliason: It…
Chair Giunchigliani: Go ahead. Thank you. I interrupted you…I apologize.
Member Eliason: I just had a question.
Chair Giunchigliani: Sure.
Member Eliason: It made me think a little bit here…
Chair Giunchigliani: Oh, no. Sorry.
Member Eliason: You said something about the recyclers here in town, Nevada, whatever it is. My understanding is once it goes through that shredder, those tires on those crushed vehicles still goes into that shredded material, which goes to…wherever they melt it down and those are burned up or whatever, they don’t pick apart the rubber out of that recycled material at that facility.
Mr. Wynder: Their recycling process…the shredding that involves basically…
Member Eliason: Mm-hmm.
Mr. Wynder: …an entire automobile is shredded and there is a pretty impressive separation process that separates the metal from the non-recyclables, sometimes referred to as “auto fluff” which would include…
Member Eliason: Which would be seats, carpet…
Mr. Wynder: Yes, sir, as well as small shredded tire material…
Chair Giunchigliani: Oh.
Mr. Wynder: …and it is that fluff, that material that contains shredded tires that is in fact, as a matter of practice, going to landfills. In fact in some areas of the country that sort of material has been approved as an alternative daily cover for landfills.
Chair Giunchigliani: Good. Do they take the airbags out of these junk vehicles?
Mr. Campbell: Do we know?
Mr. Wynder: I’m not sure.
Chair Giunchigliani: Because I was reading something about the toxic chemicals that are contained within the air bags and it’s a different environmental issue but it might be something we, down the road, we ought to talk about. I just read a paper or some article…OK, go ahead.
Mr. Wynder: That said, our outreach effort was quite substantial.
(Chair Giunchigliani left the meeting at 9:40am)
We sent out over 350 notices to waste tire generators, over 50 notices to industry stakeholders, we conducted six separate public workshops and a roundtable meeting with industry stakeholders. Additionally I personally made over 100 phone calls to members of industry, received calls to answer questions, to solicit opinion, and to invite participation. Our public comment that was received, we received written or verbal comment from over twenty members of the public and industry, over 140 individual comments were received and our public meetings resulted in over ninety pages of verbatim transcription. And throughout the public comment period staff consistently saw or heard two things. The first thing was that the Senate Bill intended for tires to be recycled and intended for tires to be banned from the landfill, and therefore these regulations should not only ban the tires that are banned in the Senate Bill, but we should go beyond that and ban all tires that can be recycled locally and prohibit those from the landfill even if they could be landfilled safely and in a manner that is approved in most of the other states in the nation. The other theme that we received, that we saw was that, again this is industry, that we support recycling but we don’t want it to be compulsory – we want basically fair market, we support the recycling industry but let’s not put us at risk for increasing prices; we want to recycle but let us do it our way. And in that sort of light that staff sought to find compromise between the, or among, all the opinions that were expressed. And that compromise, of course, had to comply with all the legal requirements of the Senate Bill; it had to be protective of the public health, the safety and the environment; we sought to make it as practical and user-friendly; and to provide flexibility to the solid waste management system to the degree possible.
So in that light, this is what we came up with. We proposed a two-tier disposal ban. One tier that bans passenger car tires from municipal solid waste landfills as required by the Senate Bill; and a second tier that goes a little bit farther and bans all pneumatic tires, and those are tires that use compressed air (those are most of the tires that we see), ban all whole pneumatic tires while allowing those tires that have been processed, cut up, chipped to the point where they are no longer operational or a safety hazard at the landfill, to be landfilled using a standard that is broadly accepted in about 70% of the states in this nation.
(Chair Giunchigliani rejoined the meeting at 9:44am)
We, in these regulations, allow for exemptions and waivers. We have standards for waste tire management facilities and waste tire haulers, and we have record-keeping requirements for tire generators, haulers and disposal facilities. That said, in our attempt to find compromise and meeting all those requirements there remain some concerns that have been expressed by industry, and I’d like to discuss those briefly and staff’s view of them. The first is that the definition of a waste tire should include motor vehicle tires. In the screen before you the underlined portion is the definition of a waste tire as stated by Senate Bill 186, now NRS. And that is that “a waste tire is a passenger car tire that is not suitable for its intended purpose because of wear, damage or defect.” Our proposed regulation later on adds to that and says “a waste tire is also a used tire that is no longer in use and is not intended for legitimate use.” The suggested change, again, states that “a waste tire” should be changed to “a waste tire is a motor vehicle tire that is not suitable.”
Again before you is the proposed definition and staff’s opinion is that the proposed definition includes motor vehicle tires as is. And that is in the last clause you see up there, “a waste tire is also a used tire that is no longer in use.” It’s staff opinion that a used tire, that a motor vehicle tire is a used tire.
Chair Giunchigliani: So the definitions that we have currently before us include these changes. I printed off a couple of them yesterday…
Mr. Wynder: They don’t include the change of including motor vehicle tires…
Chair Giunchigliani: Motor vehicle tire.
Mr. Wynder: …and that is because that staff believes that as written that it includes motor vehicle tires already, because a used motor vehicle tire is a used tire.
Chair Giunchigliani: It seems to me that would be…OK, so alright, go ahead and continue. Maybe we’ll hold questions until the end.
Mr. Wynder: A second concern has been expressed, is that the definition of processing should be stricken from these regulations. The definition of processing included in the original proposal was verbatim from Nevada Administrative Code and that you see before you, “processing means preparing a tire for recycling…or another method of disposal in landfill by chipping, splitting or otherwise altering the tire.” They want this NAC definition stricken from the proposed regulations. Their justification for that, or their reason as expressed to us is that, and they accurately point out that the NAC definition was put into place before there was a permitted waste tire management facility and so their reasoning is that this definition is now outdated. And they also expressed concern that if unchanged, this definition may be used as a justification or a blueprint to allow for the landfilling of tires.
Chair Giunchigliani: I actually had a question about that myself. OK.
Mr. Wynder: We have in response to their concern, we have proposed an alternate version of this definition which you see here before you and that would remove the definition of landfill, or it would remove the term “landfill” and this is what we’ve proposed: “processing means preparing a tire for recycling, use as a fuel or another method of disposal by chipping, splitting or otherwise altering the tire.” And from a practical standpoint for staff, processing is already a definition in Nevada Administrative Code which trumps local regulation. Furthermore processing is a term that’s used in the definition of a facility for the management of waste tires itself, so we think that it’s necessary to define this term. And lastly, staff’s opinion is that the bans, the landfill bans in NRS and these regulations make it clear that landfilling is not acceptable – this is not allowed and a definition certainly does not trump those clearly written bans.
Chair Giunchigliani: And so by doing, if the Board was to consider this, the NAC would stay in its place because it was done so long ago, but this would be a more progressive definition of making…you refer to processing other than in the definition or in the body of the ordinance.
Mr. Wynder: Yes and it removes the reference to a landfill…
Chair Giunchigliani: Right.
Mr. Wynder: …which I think…
Chair Giunchigliani: Exactly should.
Mr. Wynder: …their concern was…
Chair Giunchigliani: …because the whole point was to keep these out of landfills so you don’t want to send a message that somebody could throw one in.
Mr. Wynder: Exactly. And so we…
Chair Giunchigliani: OK.
Mr. Wynder: …made an attempt to remove the message if it was there. A third concern is that crumb rubber should not be considered solid waste. Crumb rubber is a very fine, and I’m sure Mr. Workman will explain this later in the public comment period better than I, but a crumb rubber is finely ground tire rubber and it is used on athletic fields and in asphalt paving applications as well.
Chair Giunchigliani: Sure.
Mr. Wynder: They would like to propose that we remove crumb rubber from the definition of solid waste. This is our proposed definition: “solid waste is any waste tire or material derived from waste tire, including but not limited to crumb rubber.” They state that crumb rubber is not considered solid waste at virtually, or most, of the states in the United States and Nevada would be relatively unique in that regard.
(Member Onyema left the meeting at 9:55am)
However, staff thinks that it should be left in and their reasoning is that we need to ensure that the waste management authority has the ability to enforce regulations regarding the handling procedures, the storage limits and financial assurance requirements surrounding crumb rubber. I mean, from a practical standpoint there are provisions that protect us, but we don’t want, if it’s not considered solid waste then our ability to regulate handling these things that I mentioned is at the very least in question. And from a practical standpoint, for practice, every recycling facility, every solid waste disposal site has this provision. Finished compost is considered solid waste until it is removed for use. This is a standard way that we operate here in Nevada.
(Member Onyema rejoined the meeting at 9:56am)
A fourth concern. Waste tires generated in Clark County should be taken to either an in-county recycler or an out-of-state recycler. As provided by Senate Bill 186, and now is NRS 444.505.2(g): “Regulations…must not prohibit the lawful disposal of a waste tire outside the health district.” Their suggested change is that we mandate the waste tires from Clark County go to either an in-county recycler or an out-of-state recycler and as suggested this ban would prohibit tires from Clark County from being recycled anywhere else in Nevada; and two, would be in stark contrast to the requirements of the Senate Bill 186 to not prohibit the lawful disposal of a waste tire outside the health district. And so it’s staff’s position that we can’t do this – it would be illegal for us to do this.
A fifth concern is that the two-tier disposal system that was spoken about earlier should be dropped and that all tires that are able to be processed should be banned even if it’s safe to landfill them. Again the two-tier disposal standard: one, that required by Senate Bill 186, which is to ban passenger car tires from the landfill; and the second to ban all other pneumatic tires except those that have been in process to the point where they do not cause an operational or safety hazard at the landfill. Again a standard that is in place in about 70% of the states in the nation, including our neighbor to the west, California. Their suggested change essentially is to maintain the ban on passenger car tires and ban other locally recyclable tires without allowing that processing to occur…processing and landfilling to occur. Our position, staff’s position…this is the biggest compromise issue, if you will. Senate Bill 186 only require these regulations to ban passenger car tires, but we heard I think from the two sides, one side that says the Senate Bill intended to mandate recycling, and so we should ban passenger car tires but we should also ban every other tire in the county that can be processed locally. And then there was the other side that, again, said we support recycling but we also want to have other safe disposal methods available one, and two, we don’t want to have options removed from us that may result in an increase in our disposal fees that we can’t control.
A sixth concern that was expressed is financial assurance requirements. The financial assurance requirements as proposed require that a cost…that the cost of closure be to cover what the cost would be to the health authority to oversee the clean-up of a site, including the removal and disposal of all waste tires and waste tire material. And the proposed regulations prohibit considering the resale value of equipment, waste tires, or material derived from waste tires as offsetting that financial assurance amount. The suggested change from industry was to allow the resale value of equipment and waste tire material to offset that amount, or to lower the amount that they have to set aside in order to assure proper clean up. Although this was never discussed, concerns about this were never discussed in a public workshop or in the stakeholder meeting and were only expressed to staff approximately two or three weeks ago, however there was support for it expressed in the stakeholder meeting. Staff’s opinion is that recyclables rise and fall in their value and at present there is no regulatory mechanism for staff or for the waste management authority to seize material or equipment in the case of abandonment of the site. And furthermore that equipment and that material could have been used to collateralize a loan and the waste management authority or the Board would have to ensure that they have primacy of all other liens on that material. And it’s for that reason that staff suggests that these materials not be allowed to offset financial assurance requirements.
OK. Thank you, and I’d just, before I end, briefly explain some of the effects that may be, that may result because of these regulations. One, tires may no longer be picked up curbside from residences. Now residents may have to take tires to transfer stations, MRFs or waste tire management facilities where they may or may not be expected to pay a fee for disposal. And there may be increased fees associated with purchase of new tires and/or replacement of tires. The effect on used tire generators. Disposal costs are no longer guaranteed by municipal code. There may be costs associated with complying with zoning requirements for the addition of another waste tire bin in the enclosure and want-not that’s required for that. There are record-keeping requirements for tires and there may be increased storage areas needed. The effect on the solid waste management system as a whole. The increased recycling that could result, or will likely result from these regulations, will increase the percentage of the recycling rate for the county by 0.2 – 0.5 percentage points. It will lower long-term maintenance costs at landfills; it will improve safety at the landfills, although there is a potential for an increase in illegal dumping.
So again, in conclusion seeing these two themes, or hearing these two themes in the public comment period, and seeking to achieve a compromise while meeting all legal requirements of the Senate Bill, these proposed regulations in staff’s opinion come up with some common sense compromises that broaden the tire disposal ban as requested, but also are consistent with broadly accepted standards that allow the safe and sanitary disposal of processed tires. And most importantly, these proposed regulations are protective of public health, safety and the environment. And with that I’d be pleased to take any questions.
Chair Giunchigliani: Thank you. Let me open up the public hearing on the waste tire regulations. Questions from the Board first, and if there are people here that want to testify or make additional comments, maybe start coming up to the podium. Linda?
Member Strickland: Yeah, I have some questions. I understand that what we were trying to do is be relatively consistent with Senate Bill 186 and obviously you took into consideration and balanced the interests of the two sides to include all tires versus should we…the concerns of the costs and other things like the other side had. But, I take it from your comment that we do, as a Board, have the legal opportunity to go ahead and draft regulations that would encompass all tires, correct?
Mr. Wynder: I’d like to refer legal questions to Mr. Smith.
Stephen Smith: That’d be correct, because the authority on which they’re proposing these regulations is not limited to SB186. If it was limited to SB186, which has a strait jacket definition of what a tire is, it refers to passenger car tires and excludes truck tires. What they’re attempting to is to broaden the definition under their general regulatory authority…we have statutes that authorize the solid waste management authority to regulate solid waste. They currently are regulating solid waste of which tires are a component of. So the authority is not limited to just SB186.
Member Strickland. OK. Alright.
Mr. Smith: That’s sort of the impetuous for the regulations. But it isn’t the sole legal authority. So based on that, I believe they do have the authority to go forward with what they deem fit. They’re the experts, I defer to them and their expertise.
Member Strickland: OK. Then another I talked about, one of the things on the two sides of whether we should do all tires versus not do all tires, one of the comments I believe that you made were the people who didn’t want to do all tires wanted options for the types of disposal for non-passenger tires. I don’t know what those options are. I mean we have a landfill in Boulder City and we have an area – and I know you’ve gotten emails about this from one of our persons out there – we have an area where tires get put in after hours, it’s an area that’s open and it appears based on some investigation that you guys did recently that those tend to be tires that may not fall under the auspices of this rule because they were not passenger tires – they were off-road tires or other types. I’d still like those to be out of our landfill, but it seems that what we’re doing now will not prevent them from being out of our landfill. I would have like to have seen this more broadly written or I would have like to have seen what those options of the other folks want be spelled out so I know what those are, because it seems like now there’s more free reign on the tires that are non-passenger tires.
Mr. Wynder: Thank you. Thank you very much. The Senate Bill, as expressed earlier, specifically bans only passenger car tires, and with regard to the specific case that you’re referring to I believe, the tires were ATV tires, quad tires, and they would not be included in these broader ban, largely out of a concern for residents who manage their own off-road vehicles. Furthermore, these specific types of tires, because of way that they’re manufactured pose very little risk from an operational and safety hazard when disposed of in a landfill which cannot be said for passenger car tires and maybe truck tires, which are semi-truck tires. And so while those specific types of tires have been excluded under these proposed regulations, it’s staff’s opinion that they can be safely disposed of in a municipal solid waste landfill without any immediate or long-term consequences. That said, with these proposed regulations as they’re written, I think we would tend to think that there is not in fact free reign, so to speak, because essentially a whole tire from a semi-truck or from a bus or from any vehicle could not be disposed of in a landfill and this is the standard in most of the states in the union, in fact there’s only nine of the fifty states in the United States ban tires completely from the landfill as it’s been proposed to us. And in fact those are in place generally because of landfill space restrictions. Nevertheless we can, as Mr. Smith said, we can do that…the Board can do that – it’s the Board’s discretion. As written, we feel that the vast majority of tires will be recycled, but it will leave in place an alternative disposal option that is consistent with other standard and that is consistent with the legal requirements of Senate Bill 186. Again, that said, my thought…staff’s opinion is that most people will not utilize this option, because again it is only available to non-passenger car tires, and it by and large is passenger car tires where retailers, mostly the smaller retailers are cutting out the sidewalls, which essentially flattens the tire, which means that when you throw it in the landfill it’s not going to collect landfill gas and roll up and when you dump it out it’s not going to start bouncing down, risking injury to people at the landfill. This activity is banned under these provisions. The only tires that could be processed again in a way that’s accepted in most states in the nation, are those tires, are those types that are not specifically exempted by the Senate Bill.
Chair Giunchigliani: So your new definition would allow for the ATV, the motorcycle…I thought it excluded that, so they couldn’t…
Mr. Wynder: Correct. Under these proposed, under the two-tiered disposal ban as proposed ATV tires, off-road tires are exempted from the landfill ban.
Member Strickland: And so I’m getting from what you’re telling, when you’re talking about safety, the tires in the landfill and you’re referencing safety, you talked about things like landfill gases, tires rolling around, you talked about passenger tires having a safety element to it, and I…perhaps I was under the impression, the incorrect impression that one of our concerns was filling our landfills and it seems like those other tires that you don’t have, or they don’t think have this safety concern, they will fill our landfills and so I guess I’m looking at it from not just safety, but I’m looking at it from are we going to try to prevent our landfills from continuing to be occupied by these other types of tires as well. And so I appreciate the safety concerns because, of course, we need to be concerned about those types of things, but I think there’s other elements to the discussion of whether or not these other types of tires should be included in our landfill.
Mr. Wynder: I agree, that definitely should be part of the discussion and certainly something that staff has considered. The three municipals solid waste landfills, again that Dennis referred to, were the, or are the landfill in Boulder City, the landfill in Laughlin and the Apex landfill. Size restrictions, I think, become acutely of interest in Boulder City and in Laughlin. The Apex landfill, depending upon what piece of paper you look at, has a life span of anywhere from one hundred to two hundred years. And that’s a considerable amount of time. The…certainly these regulations could ban tires for those space restrictions reasons. An alternative option would of course be for the operators or for the owners of those landfills to prohibit disposals of tires in the landfill. These regulations don’t…regulations do not need to be passed in order for a landfill operator or a landfill owner to say “I don’t want to receive this specific type of waste.” I understand that there are franchise agreements and I’m not aware of all the fineries of those franchise agreements, but nevertheless the Boulder City or the Laughlin landfill could establish rules where tires in any form cannot be accepted there, will not be accepted here without that being applied through regulatory means. Does that answer…
Member Strickland: Well it answers my question and it lets me know from what point you’re looking at it. You know, even with Apex, which is, like you said, long time that it’s supposed to be there, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to continue to allow even those other types of tires in there. I mean, at some point as our community continues to grow and the economy comes back and people start coming back in here, that landfill may end up filling up a little faster than what is presently predicted.
Mr. Wynder: Certainly. And if I may this is, as Dennis stated earlier, the first law that prohibits a recyclable material from the landfill. There’s other recyclable materials that are – such as metal, paper, plastic – that are allowed to go to the landfill and that either to one degree or another are recycled in the county. That said, this may be one of those hiccups that the Board and that the community’s going to have to decide how we want to proceed. Do we want to ban something strictly because it is recyclable or do we want to allow for the disposal, the safe disposal while doing our best to encourage recycling. And again, in these proposed regulations, we’ve proposed not to do that except as legally required, as mandated by the Senate Bill.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK. Let me do this, since we have public lined, why don’t we take them first and then they may actually prompt some additional questions for Board members and/or answers and then we’ll go back with our questions, if that would be acceptable. Good morning.
Member Eliason: For those Board members that ate Wheaties.
Chair Giunchigliani: Ow. Good morning. Who would like to go first? Senator.
Warren Hardy: Thank you, Madam Chair. It’s nice to see you…
Chair Giunchigliani: Good seeing you.
Mr. Hardy: …today. Warren Hardy representing Nevada Pic-A-Part. I, just to go back to the legislation quickly. This was started out…Senator Copening introduced this legislation, which we believe is a good piece of legislation, in fact in another life, I actually, if you look at…
Chair Giunchigliani: You voted for it.
Mr. Hardy: …I voted for it and co-sponsored it. But there were conversations that occurred during the legislature, and we appreciate Senator Copening’s efforts on this and she clarified not only in the Bill but also in the record several times, I don’t think that’s in dispute, but she intended end-of-life vehicles to be exempted from the Bill. I do understand and will stipulate to the fact that this is going beyond the Bill, and I think that there’s some merit in that; however what we don’t want to see happen, and I should back up again and just thank your staff. I’ve been..you know, Madam Chair, you and I have been involved in this stuff about the same amount of time…we went in the Assembly the same year, I’ve been involved in doing regulations for a long, long time. I’ve never seen a more difficult statute to try to put into regulation. I’ve also never seen a better public outreach by a staff to try to address the concerns, and I particularly want to recognize Mr. Wynder because, in my opinion, he went above and beyond.
I came prepared today to just simply say this is a difficult issue, this is a difficult regulation and to establish or provide a record of the intent is to end-of-life vehicles, OK junk vehicles to be exempted, because that was clearly the intent of the legislature from the Bill and that’s directly from Senator Copening’s testimony. But something…we’re really down to one issue that concerns us and that is the definition of a waste tire, and ironically it was an attempt to help us that’s causing us some problems. The definition of a waste tire in Section 37, or definition 37 is “a passenger tire that is not…” you’ll see which is from the draft… “a tire when part of a wheel is attached to a junk vehicle is not a waste tire.” That’s an attempt to address our concern, and we appreciate that and it does, except for one factor that I’d like the Board to consider. On a minority, an extreme minority, a number of vehicles we take the wheels off. And the reason we take the wheels off is to process the aluminum wheels, to recycle the aluminum wheels to resell the aluminum wheels. That is a practice that we’ll be forced to make a business decision on if this is passed, and a tire that comes off becomes a waste tire. Let me try to be a little more clear on that. We would prefer language to say that a tire which is part of a wheel that is associated with a junk vehicle. We don’t support, and certainly don’t believe that it’s the intent to try to put ten tires in a junk car before you process it. Now that’s not the intent. But what we also don’t want to happen is the good, the good effort to recycle rubber, recycle tires be the enemy of recycling aluminum. Because, you know, the reality of it is, and I started in this town, my family started in this town in 1951 in the tire business and figuring out how to dispose of tires was a problem then and it remains a problem now. It’s progressing…it’s getting better, but we need to be a little careful with the term, associated the term recycling tires. The applications for recycling tires aren’t there yet in the open market, if fact there is a process…Somebody asked earlier about the process for separating the junk. There’s a technology for separating rubber out. The problem is it’s not viable in the market place because there’s not a market for that product, if there were a market for that product. So we have to be very, very careful about how all this rubber is ultimately, what’s its end life is. And so what we would hate to see happen is our efforts to recycle or to reuse aluminum wheels go away because it’s not economically feasible for us to continue to process that as we currently do. So because of the efforts of Mr. Wynder and his staff, we’re down to one real concern and that is that waste tire definition. We do want to clarify for the record that it is the intent that processers of end-of-life vehicles were intended to be exempted; we don’t have major objection to the Board expanding somewhat that mission with, because we believe in what they’re trying to accomplish and that is anything that’s recyclable. But we just want to be very careful that that’s not…that doesn’t create an unintended consequence of us being forced to make an economic decision not to process the aluminum that comes off those wheels. And we would, I think, be happy with just a definition change from “attached to a junk vehicle” and there’s one other place where that would be required in the regulations to associate…I’ll leave it up to the attorneys to come up with a better work of art, but we think that the five tires that are associated with the junk vehicle ought to be able to be disposed of if we harvest the aluminum wheels. So with that I’ll close and appreciate your time. Thank you very much, and again thank you so much to staff. Extraordinary outreach. Thank you.
Chair Giunchigliani: Thank you.
Mr. Hardy: I’ll be happy to answer questions if there are any.
Chair Giunchigliani: Questions? I think, I underlined that part back when I was printing out one or two pages trying to save a tree and I did have a question on that…first about why it was exempting then also I didn’t realize it may in some circumstances take that tire off and so this language could stop you from being able to do what you’re saying you’re doing…
Mr. Hardy: Right.
Chair Giunchigliani: …and then still have the threshold question of do we want any tires to go, so maybe we still…What do they do with that tire that…do they take it off…
Mr. Hardy: Just put it in the vehicle and run through the control process.
Chair Giunchigliani: So it’s not…OK…
Mr. Hardy: I think what they…
Mr. Wynder: They crush it, is that correct?
Chair Giunchigliani: They crush it.
Mr. Hardy: There’s a couple factors you need to consider. One is that once, and I’ll just tell you why I feel co-sponsored the Bill. I co-sponsored the Bill because I was in the automotive business since 1951, my family was…
Chair Giunchigliani: Mm-hmm…
Mr. Hardy: …I was, I grew up…I went to college in that business. Putting whole tires in the landfill is a bad idea, it’s a bad idea. Not because of the tire, necessarily, but because of the problems it creates otherwise…
Chair Giunchigliani: Right.
Mr. Hardy: …rising to the top…
Chair Giunchigliani: Powder.
Mr. Hardy: …all those kinds of things. Putting shredded tires in the landfill is not a problem…in fact it makes a wonderful pallet to do over the dust. It’s not an environmental problem. So, and again…and another thing I would like the Board to consider is simply the fact that we don’t want to pass a point of no return where it’s not cost effective for the public to process their end-of-use vehicles, because that’s going to lead to more of problems we’ve had in the desert, more vehicles being left on the street if it’s not cost effective to Nevada, to dispose of the vehicle properly. So we don’t want to lose sight of that either.
Member Jones: Is there a quick answer as to why it’s not economical to recycle the junk tire?
Mr. Hardy: Because there’s no market for the junk tire.
Member Jones: But I mean, you can shred it…it could go to the landfill or not?
Mr. Hardy: That…it…
Member Christensen: Yes.
Mr. Hardy: Yeah, I mean currently that’s what happens.
Member Jones: So would this regulation prohibit that process of shredding and sending it…
Mr. Wynder: No. No.
Member Jones: …and so I don’t understand the conflict.
Mr. Hardy: No, no…we’re happy with that portion of the Bill; we believe that we’re exempted properly now as intended by SB186 – we’re happy with that process of going through it. The only concern I had is that the only portion is not clear is what we do with tires where we’re attempting to sell or recycle aluminum tires that are on junk vehicles. We want to be able to continue that practice and if we’re not able to take those wheels off for the purposes of harvesting them for resell or recycling, then we’re just going to have to run them through. And the attempt to get tires recycled, and we’re going to do violence to our process to recycling aluminum, which is the best metal to recycle – it’s highly recyclable, it pays to recycle aluminum because it’s so expensive to produce. Recycling aluminum is the, you know, the top of the mountain. And we don’t want the attempt to recycle a little bit of tires to do violence to that effort.
Chair Giunchigliani: And would there be an opportunity business-wise to establish maybe some kind of drop box for those that you’ve now removed the aluminum…but you don’t stick it back in the car to be crushed with the car…
Mr. Hardy: There’s…
Chair Giunchigliani: …but could actually…
Mr. Hardy: …thank you, Madam Chair…
Chair Giunchigliani: …and I don’t know, I’m just thinking…
Mr. Hardy: …certainly. There’s no additional expense to that, I don’t think we’d have an objection to that whatsoever.
Chair Giunchigliani: Because we do have one manufacturer and I’m hoping more come into town to be able to use the rubber incinerate.
Mr. Hardy: Right. No, and again I want…the use of crumb rubber is, not as a recyclable…
Chair Giunchigliani: Right.
Mr. Hardy: …used for other purposes is advancing. But it’s not there yet. I think a lot of this product sits shipped to other countries, because there’s no market use for the product. I know there’s discussion about it being used in roads. NDOT, to my knowledge, is not currently approved.
Member Eliason: No…
Chair Giunchigliani: Actually, they did, yeah they do.
Member Eliason: I’m thinking if any of us municipalities require it either in our roads, yet.
Chair Giunchigliani: No, I’m looking into it at the county-level, particularly with our contracts. I did check with Susan from NDOT, they did the stretch in Henderson from 95 two years ago with the crumb rubber product and are very pleased with it. So they’re going to be looking, I don’t know mandating, but including it in their contractual because it’s so much quieter and especially on a highway, especially when we’re redoing our neighborhood streets it actually has an impact on the noise reduction for folks. So, there’s an opportunity there, but you’re right, I don’t think any of the local governments have done anything with it.
Mr. Hardy: It has evolved and certainly we’d like nothing more…
Chair Giunchigliani: To be part of that.
Mr. Hardy: …for that part has value on the open market.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK, so that’s still something…
Mr. Hardy: It’s evolving.
Chair Giunchigliani: Yeah.
Mr. Hardy: Hopefully we’ll be back here to implement all kinds of uses for it.
Chair Giunchigliani: Question? OK.
Member Eliason: I guess another question, a spot came out while the Senator was talking, are all of our municipalities and contracts to our wrecking yards, or to our towing companies that tow for us for the city, are we causing or could possibly be causing a problem because as I see some of this, you’re going to have people pushing cars out on the street so then we, as city and county, will go to them and now it’s going to create an issue for them if they…what you described.
Mr. Hardy: That’s part of our concern. Again, you just take a holistic approach to this because everything has a cause and effect. And when you try, which is an admirable purpose again, I supported the legislation because crunching the tires, or shredding the tires makes it safe and acceptable for a landfill, otherwise it’s…that’s why I support the legislation. We just don’t want the unintended consequences to be that we’re forced to make a business decision about recycling in other areas driving up the cost of processing the vehicle. And that is a legitimate…
Member Eliason: Well, see…and that’s when you say driving up the cost, unfortunately there will be some people that say send their vehicle to the shredder, some businessmen, that’s going to fill it clear full of tires to get shredded up as a way of getting rid of them.
Mr. Hardy: And in our opinion that should absolutely be part of the regulation. We believe that the tires should be associated with that vehicle and that vehicle only. And there are ways to do that…
Chair Giunchigliani: Mm-hmm.
Mr. Hardy: …you can tell which size approximately was…
Member Eliason: Well, I mean four tires are on a car, and…
Mr. Hardy: Five.
Member Eliason: Well, five…the spare.
Mr. Hardy: The spare.
Member Eliason: Well the other concern I have is, as I stated earlier in my other life, just one of my shopping centers which was twenty-two dumpsters, and I’m getting illegal tires in there on a daily basis now. I don’t know how, since it’s illegal dumping it’s got to fall under that category but I don’t know how Republic is forced to deal with those, because I didn’t know they were in there, they just dump them and now it’s gotta be landfilled.
Chair Giunchigliani: Yeah, and under the reg that would not affect the franchisee because they were not willfully…
Member Eliason: Right, that’s…
Chair Giunchigliani: …doing it, but the issue still comes down to…
Member Eliason: Filling the landfill.
Chair Giunchigliani: …filling landfill…we don’t want people…we don’t want to do something that causes them to dump even more tires, we’ve got to find some way, maybe incentivize folks to take them to a proper place, in other words, or allow for that. I see Bob’s here, so maybe down the road we can have Republic comment on…you know when we do, I didn’t realize we allowed tires to be picked up at curbside and I thought that was one of the things we added to the transfer station with the paint and the oil, or it was something along those lines. But maybe we can look at, and I don’t know if it’s an additional burden, but at least when we do that quarterly (I think it’s quarterly) allowance for the public, we can add tires there so that at least we’re not forcing them to dump them in a trash bin some place and come out and dump them…but that…
Mr. Hardy: And Madam Chair, taking my private sector hat off and putting my recently resigned public policy hat…I think the objective of this Board ought to be to figure out a way, at all possible, to find a way that whole tires are not put into landfills. That is a huge, huge step in the right direction. This other stuff, maybe we’ll get to someday, but finding a way to prevent whole tires from being put in a landfill will do more good environmentally for our state than most anything else we can do. Again, the reason I supported the legislation and support it again.
Member Eliason: Not only that it will be good for Republic Services because it’s that much less space when we do it right.
Mr. Hardy: Thank you.
Chair Giunchigliani: Thank you very much. Good morning.
David Christensen: Good morning. David Christensen, I’m the president of Nevada Pic-A-Part and we have operated auto recycling for end-of-life vehicles for twenty years. We would definitely be involved in recycling tires and we are to the fullest extent we could if it was financially sound business for us to do so, but it is not. That’s why Warren has helped us represent this. I was in favor, and we also went on board with the Bill because we were going to be exempted and we still desperately need that exemption to continue to operate like we do, clearing vehicles off the streets is a real issue…
Chair Giunchigliani: Mm-hmm.
Mr. Christensen: …for this. In our life as recyclers and that, we’ve done other things. We operated the Boulder City landfill for an extended period of time. We were the operator at that entity and we’ve worked with the issues of tires. There’s nothing environmentally unsound in disposing of tire rubber in a landfill – it’s inert, it’s used as daily ground cover in many states, it’s not that there’s…there’s no vectors involved, there’s nothing with it – it’s just junk that can go in there without any problems. The problem is if they’re whole because they have air in them, they float, if there’s water in the area they can make little pools for mosquitoes and things and that becomes a problem. So, and for years we recycled these tires through, the end-of-life vehicles, through just shredding and that so that the tires are little pieces of tire like this that go along with the upholstery and the car with glass in the car, with the carpet that’s in a car, and it just goes in the landfill because there’s nothing you can do with it. It’s worthless. My concern is we’re worried about, we’ve talked here about taking up space in the landfill. What about the recycled rubber that can’t be used anywhere that’s not marketable that ends up in these foreign countries where they throw it in their furnaces and generate electricity with it and then it comes into our atmosphere? So, I just wanted to mention those two things about it because putting shredded tires in a landfill is not really a problem at this point – it’s a very sound method of disposing. It’s done in a lot of states and it’s being done here right now and should continue.
(Member Eliason left the meeting at 10:24am)
Chair Giunchigliani: Thank you very much. And so what you’re speaking to…nothing we can do now with the small bits of tire, but I think there is a manufacturer that can be utilizing it and we don’t want to…
Mr. Christensen: Right, that’s different from our issue…
Chair Giunchigliani: Correct, which is being able to take it off and take your aluminum component. Thank you very much. Good morning.
Barry Temple: Hi, I’m Barry Temple with Tire Works. I think probably I just came to pile on and mostly because Dennis and particularly Ed inherited a Bill that was not conducive to effective regulation writing. At the very least, I think that’s putting it nicely. Ed has been so diligent in reaching out to the stakeholders, to the community, reminding us that are a little bit absent-minded that while we’re trying to look at this, he should truly be commended by this body, this Board, I’m very serious in that. My only other comment is this. The retailers that I have spoken with are not at all against recycling, in fact they’re very much in favor of it; however the situation that we’re in in Clark County is that we have very, very limited options of where we can take that product to be recycled.
Chair Giunchigliani: And you take it currently to California?
Mr. Temple: Currently it’s going to California…
Chair Giunchigliani: Right.
Mr. Temple: …and quite honestly the reason for that is cost. It’s approximately a quarter of the cost to send it to California than it would be to leave it here. And when we looked at these issues, we realized that not only does it cost us more, because of the transportation feature that’s involved, etc., etc., but ultimately it costs our customers more and when you get…I don’t know what the point is, there’s some level where people go we’re just not going to do this and these tires that we’re keeping out of our landfills end up in our deserts because people are like I’m not paying that much money, I’m just going to haul it in the back of a truck and we’ll take three or four loads out in the desert where nobody’s going to notice it. How is that environmentally effective? I don’t…that’s the point I don’t get. It’s not the retailers that are saying oh well we can’t do this…if we have to do it, we’ll have to do it. Even though one of the discussions that Ed brought up in his presentation is we’ve designed facilities around certain procedures and ways we’ve done things and in order to redo them those facilties are going to have to be redone and in many cases with sites’ expense involved, it’s also zoning requirements, building code requirements…there’s other things that we would have to go through, hoops to jump through so to speak, in order to comply.
Chair Giunchigliani: And that’s because of the volume of what your discount, or your tires have when you’re changing out…
Mr. Temple: When you have a situation where Republic was coming once a day…
Chair Giunchigliani: OK.
Mr. Temple: …and removing a three-yard container…
Chair Giunchigliani: OK.
Mr. Temple: …and now you have, we actually have had to reduce the size of our containers so with trying to stay within the confines of the space that we have we’re having tires removed now weekly approximately. So it’s a storage issue. There’s no question about it. We’d still like to see those go every day because there’s other issues that come up with that storage as well, but it’s just not feasible right now. So…
Chair Giunchigliani: OK. California, when it’s shipped, where does it go there then? Does it go to a recycler…
Mr. Temple; It goes to recycling and they have found a way to effectively sell the recycling that they do so that they’re a profitable company without having very large fees.
Chair Giunchigliani: Where does the $1 go that we got incurred…
Mr. Temple: Now don’t confuse please. The $1 is a state tire tax that’s applied to new tires. We’re talking about…
Chair Giunchigliani: Old tires.
Mr. Temple: …old tires which has a disposal fee that’s imposed by the retailer to cover the expense of having the tire removed.
Chair Giunchigliani: What’s that disposal fee generally?
Mr. Temple: It’s varies. It’s $2-3 generally, it varies among the different retailers. But our point it so long as we have options that we can still effectively do business and not make the price of this disposal more than our customers can bear we’re good with the recycling part. It’s just the infrastructure…
Chair Giunchigliani: Part of it is getting your product back out of there, the larger businesses that have storage issue…
Mr. Temple: Correct.
Chair Giunchigliani: And as we hopefully license or permit more individuals to participate in this and that might help offset that…
Mr. Temple: It certainly should. It certainly should – competition always, you know…
Chair Giunchigliani: So when we buy a new tire…
Mr. Temple: Mm-hmm.
Chair Giunchigliani: …the replaced old one goes someplace, usually more often than not California, and the new tire that’s put on, that’s where the $1 goes…ends up…and a small portion comes back to the county, correct? And then the $2-3 you’re speaking of is a cost of business component that’s added on by…
Mr. Temple: Well, except the…
Chair Giunchigliani: …or just in pricing?
Mr. Temple: …removal of the tire is not covered by the $1 state tire tax – that’s only…every tire we sell we send the state $1. It’s…that’s the way it is.
Chair Giunchigliani: And then the $2-3 thing is…
Mr. Temple: It involves the removal…
Chair Giunchigliani: OK.
Mr. Temple: …that’s where the $2-3 removal comes in.
Chair Giunchigliani: And that’s your general business cost is what you’re saying…
Mr. Temple: Yeah.
Chair Giunchigliani: …that you add to the cost of buying and…
Mr. Temple: …to process that old tire and get rid of it.
Member Jones: So your issue really is with the retail piece that applies to Senate Bill 186?
Mr. Temple: Correct.
Member Jones: And I don’t know that there’s a wiggle room to do something different…
Mr. Temple: Well there is and the interesting thing is that while there is some wiggle room there’s a provision for exemptions…none of the retailers that I’ve spoken with have any desire whatsoever to take that exemption – we want to get on board with this. We see very positive things but we’re just very leery about the way it was originally introduced, some of the costs that were associated with what we originally saw and when we realized that hey, this is going to backfire on everybody because it’s not been approached appropriately. And again, Dennis and Ed have done an outstanding job of kind of…
Chair Giunchigliani: Maneuvering…
Mr. Temple: …maneuvering that issue and we are all very grateful to them, because this could have been very, very ugly and now it’s only minorly ugly. So…
Chair Giunchigliani: That’s not bad in government.
Mr. Temple: Yeah, I mean given that I remember when you were on the Nevada faculty and we were having the Code wars…
Chair Giunchigliani: Right.
Mr. Temple: …at the time. More Chris G history. This is relatively tame.
Chair Giunchigliani: Yes, it is. You guys were nuts over there.
Mr. Temple: Yeah, well…
Chair Giunchigliani: It was fun nuts.
Mr. Temple: Totally…
Chair Giunchigliani: Well, that gives us some food for thought. Is there a reason though, and maybe Bob can speak, that you’re down to one…no longer a daily pickup that’s impacting or is that…
Mr. Temple: Well because instead of Republic taking…
Chair Giunchigliani: You’re going to have others…
Mr. Temple: …the company from California’s coming weekly.
Chair Giunchigliani: I gotcha. OK.
Mr. Temple: They have a minimum…well Republic never had a minimum, they came and picked…actually theirs was a maximum – if we were over the top of our dumpster it was an overcharge.
Chair Giunchigliani: Right.
Mr. Temple: Their over-fee or whatever it was, but there was no minimum. This company has a minimum. If we don’t have eighty tires to be removed then we have to pay a higher rate for them to come.
Chair Giunchigliani: So if we could look at a business model down the road and you could look at a business model, potentially, so maybe whatever we do we still have a working group that looks at how do we find some manufacturing to come into play and how do we assist with keeping the tires here if we can use them here.
Mr. Temple: Actually on this issue, I think Dennis put together a fairly good working group that was fairly representative and what we did, we did public meetings…it was the case that was there was a lot of kind of brief, informative phone calls that went back and forth that somebody just threw this out here, what’s your input on it…
Chair Giunchigliani: That’s what I was thinking about…
Mr. Temple: …did an outstanding job and I felt like we all were heard and I felt like our opinions were taken into consideration.
Chair Giunchigliani: Alright, and maybe we can keep that alive, gentlemen…
Mr. Temple: I’d appreciate that whatsoever.
Chair Giunchigliani: Thank you.
Mr. Temple: And that’s basically what I have. Thank you very much.
Chair Giunchigliani: Good to see you. Thanks. Good morning.
Robin Robinson: Good morning. My name is Robin Robinson, I represent SA Recycling – we are the largest recycler here in the state of Nevada as well as the state of California. First of all I’d like to start out by thanking Dennis and Ed for working with the stakeholder group and with all the parts of the…with all the interested parties concerning this matter. I’d like to first start out by stating what recycling is. A lot of things get shoved under that term. Unless you actually want to take the item and actually get it to a reusable form to be of a beneficial use to somebody, it’s not really recycling. When we talk about…we actually got in the business in the late ‘70s because Orange County, California needed a way to decrease the volume of materials going into its landfills, so the best way to do it is first of all to change the shape of the materials. A refrigerator takes up a lot of space in a landfill. By shredding a refrigerator and removing the metal content of it, so if it’s very large, you change it into something that’s very small to decrease your landfill values. Our company has developed the most advanced metal separation technology in the world, actually we’re able to reclaim metal and separate out about the size of a piece of safety glass, be it copper or aluminum, steel or whatever, and then what’s left is, in California, goes to several landfills that use it as alternative daily cover and puts it to use. And what makes it valuable to them is they don’t have to import any material to cover their landfill on a daily basis. Here they’re able to take in material that normally would have to go into a fill so we’re actually decreasing the volume once again, and that actually has a beneficial use to the landfill. When it comes to recycling of plastics and rubbers, we’ve actually got the technology developed that in our shredding operation we can separate the plastic out, we even separate different types of plastic out. Your computers here are the plastics used are the highest grade and we can chip it down. But to us, we can generate an economic value to do it, so we’re landfilling any plastics. We even had built a plant to do it, we tore it right down…we ran it for a day and saw that it wasn’t going to be an economic venture. When it comes to the recycling of rubber, you keep hearing that oh it’s shipped to the recycler in California – that recycler that’s in Santa Fe Springs chips the rubber, they then load it into LAN-C containers and ships it to China. Here in China they use that rubber as a fuel stock in facilities that might have primitive, if any, air pollution control devices. So actually we’re adding to pollution by recycling. So we’re kind of dumping our…
Chair Giunchigliani: Problem.
Mr. Robinson: …problem somewhere else. When it comes to use in asphalt, you can utilize it in asphalt but there is a maximum amount of rubber you can put in the asphalt industry, and some asphalt recyclers in the past have not totally engaged in the “true spirit” of recycling and are more of sham recycler in ways that dump off hazardous material to be encapsulated within their asphalt process. When it comes to the regulations, there’s one problem with the two-tiered definition, getting away from just passenger tires – you’re getting into truck tires. We all know that our trucking industries are hurting right now and any other cost will be detrimental to them. We’d like to have an idea of what the size of tires they’re considering, is it just truck tires? I know some of the recycling equipment are limited to what they can recycle because of the size of the equipment, where you can’t put a real big tire in a smaller type of machine. So we have a little bit of problem going immediately with the second tier – we’d like to keep it as a passenger tire until we figure out exactly what the limits are of the, that could be processed locally as part of the definition. And that’s what I have.
Chair Giunchigliani: I think locally the company permitted can take truck tires, but not the gigantic ones, with the little column…
Mr. Robinson: Is there a certain size?
Chair Giunchigliani: …that’s my non-technical term. And I didn’t really see in here specifically, because I think we’re trying to encourage through this reg as many types of tire as we can. We exempted the junk vehicles in association with and then we looked at the motorcycle, ATV-type. Doesn’t prohibit working towards finding something, but it doesn’t mandate that. I…if we’re going to get a manufacturer going or get companies come here, I don’t want to do something that’s restricts their opportunity being able to…I think that’s part of what we’re trying to make sure that balance is there so that’s…
Mr. Robinson: And one thing, too. We have to make sure that the materials actually getting recycled because what’s going to happen is that in this type of recycling…we do like all the oil filter recycling in the state of California – we get paid to take oil filters, but we also have developed a way that we recycle the oil that we recover from and we’re one of the largest sell sites in the state of California…we also sell the metal. We have to make sure that the, whatever you break apart, has a valuable, a real market. Tires in California, a lot of them are going in to the cement industry…
Chair Giunchigliani: Ah…
Mr. Robinson: …to add via…
Chair Giunchigliani: Kilns.
Mr. Robinson: Well, most of those kilns are shut down now because the cost for us to manufacture concrete is higher than what it is from importing from China. Robert made a comment earlier about, you know, the stuff in cars. Well if we have a car that comes in with like ten truck tires stuffed into a car that vehicle is rejected because it’s…economically would be too expensive to recycle because we have to pay for the disposal. So, what we recognize and that the industry recognizes throughout the United States is that five passenger tires can come in with a crushed vehicle to be shredded, because it’s like seats – we don’t require the seats to be removed or the dashboards to be removed. We recognize that a passenger car or vehicle has five tires associated with it. Now we’re not talking about the big truck tires to get rid of them for a disposal package, the five tires that are associated with the vehicle.
Mr. Wynder: Madam Chair?
Chair Giunchigliani: Yes, Ed.
Mr. Wynder: There’s been a number of concerns expressed and I think that we can address those. If we go back to the beginning, the definition of a waste tire, staff is not opposed to changing to “associated with the junk vehicle” or other phrasing “is attached to or was detached from a junk vehicle.”
Chair Giunchigliani: And you may want to play around with the language, as well as for permitted facility, because the issue you’ve got Pic-A-Part, for example, has a permit to do that and so you want to…maybe we can tighten that up because it’s understood that those have a permit to accept that type of the junk vehicles would be exempted. So somebody can just start up a Pic-A-Part, sorry to use your name, but I mean, Pic-A-Part and not have a permit and not have practices in place. So maybe the word “associated” and “licensed” or something along those lines might help with that problem.
Mr. Wynder: OK.
Chair Giunchigliani: Thank you. Yes, anything else? Thank you. Oh wait, before you go…I’m looking at my charts. Do you recycle antifreeze, electronic waste, gas, oil and then metals. What’s ferrous and non-ferrous?
Mr. Robinson: OK. What we do is take a car, let’s take your car that you drove her today in…
Chair Giunchigliani: Uh-huh. It’s dirty.
Mr. Robinson: …let’s get it out of the parking lot and we’ll take it down to our yard right now. Before we could process that vehicle we have to take the oil out; we have to take the gasoline out so we don’t have an explosion; we take the antifreeze out; we take the battery out; there’s things that we have to do before we could process it, and then we’ll actually shred it. And the difference between ferrous and non-ferrous…the steel…
Chair Giunchigliani: OK, something…
Mr. Robinson: …is then ferrous metal and that’s what pay our bills and makes us break even, we make our profit in metal separation technology that we’ve developed to get the aluminum, copper, insulated wire, stainless steel, print circuit boards out.
Chair Giunchigliani: I didn’t see tires on my checklist, but I don’t know how accurate this is.
Mr. Robinson: We do not accept tires…
Chair Giunchigliani: Tires.
Mr. Robinson: …we’re not a tire recycler…but if they are associated with the car…
Chair Giunchigliani: With the car. Mm-hmm.
Mr. Robinson: …just like the seats and chair and dashboard, we do accept.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK. Thank you.
Mr. Wynder: And Madam Chair…
Chair Giunchigliani: Yes.
Mr. Wynder: …there were a number of concerns expressed there regarding the viability of recycling, recycling waste tires. It’s certainly staff’s opinion and we addressed this because this was a comment that was raised in the…
Chair Giunchigliani: Public.
Mr. Wynder: …stakeholder meeting that it’s staff opinion that there is a viable market for tire recycling and that is nation-wide in the form of tire-derived fuels, in the form of athletic fields, and other ways as well. Two, a concern of shredded tires being shipped overseas. Now there is some degree…
(Member Christensen left the meeting at 10:45am)
Chair Giunchigliani: We just dropped, I’ll just note for the record we’re below quorum. We’ll continue as a sub-committee and hopefully when…we can take action. So let…
Member Jones: Dr. Christensen will be back.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK.
Mr. Wynder: There is some limit on the degree to which we can do research, but our understanding based on speaking with folks in the industry is that the amount of waste tires that are chipped and sent to countries that may not have the same exact environmental standards that we do is a very, very small amount – the vast majority go to Korea and to Japan. And my understanding, and again I’m not an expert in international environmental regulations, is that their environmental regulations are what we would generally term satisfactory. And so we addressed this concern, it’s leaving it up to the federal government to negotiate those environmental treaties.
Chair Giunchigliani: Right, and down the road, you know, this is step one, I think, and it’s a good step to be taking, in my opinion, and I think you’ve done a commendable job, above and beyond and I do think that both you and Dennis and the department have been very, very open and transparent and that’s…you’re to be applauded. We may still have to flush a few things out, so to speak, but I don’t think that that would jeopardize what we’re all trying to accomplish in the long run. Bless you. Good morning.
Jason Workman: Good morning. My name is Jason Workman, I’m from Phoenix Recycling Technologies. Certainly this is an issue that’s had a little bit more attention and time devoted to it than probably was intended. I would like to thank you for giving me my time.
(Member Christensen rejoined the meeting at 10:49am)
Mr. Workman: A lot of things were discussed in general, and maybe I could just clear up some of them that pertain to Ed’s regulations. First of all Ed is correct – to our knowledge and we’re quite familiar with the world of tire recycling in all its forms, whether it’s chipped or shredded or mulched, or as we manufacture crumb rubber. It is a tiny fraction of chipped waste tires that get exported, those chipped tires that are indeed used for tire-derived fuel, that portion of the recycling business 95% of it stays in America in the burners, in some kilns, lime-kilns. Here in California there are maybe…the ability for such a cheap product to withstand freight to the Orient for burning, it’s a really, really small amount. I don’t have a nice PowerPoint, I need bring my own show and tell just to show the Board – this is crumb rubber and there’s going to be a lot of talk about it. In general we’re talking about recycling and there’s people talking about definitions of recycling. That, and Ed did, by the way, a very good job of listing our concerns with the regulations. So I think we can use that as a back-and-forth. I don’t think it’s antagonistic, I think it’s just an issue we’re trying to get to some point where I believe we can. Our company, Phoenix Recycling Technologies, we manufacture crumb rubber. We do not manufacture tire-derived fuel – we shred tires and then prep them to go out. We don’t take mulches – we manufacture that, it’s a very difficult process to remove 99.5% of the steel, to remove the tire fluff that’s in there. I will get to address the issues of should it be considered a solid waste or not. But indeed that is a very specific manufactured product. There are roughly seventy tire recyclers in the United States – we didn’t have one in Nevada until we came in – most of whom produce crumb rubber. Crumb rubber is all consumed in the United States, I personally know of no issue where it’s exported. The markets are very well established over the past twenty years for us to be able to work and deliver loads. As a matter of fact we are supplying our first shipment to Las Vegas Paving, 330 tons of our crumb were reapproved by NDOT rubber asphalt for its use.
Chair Giunchigliani: Good, good, good.
Mr. Workman: …and we have a much larger project starting up with Las Vegas Paving, hopefully over the summer, because our product in asphalt is in the process of being approved by the county as a direct substitute for the SBS modified polymer which is what’s required here in Las Vegas and if that project is approved, I would like to tell you that if we sold nothing else, five of my facilities could not supply the crumb for that substitution and the limitation for our ability to supply that crumb is selfishly – and that’s why we’re here – is the supply…
Chair Giunchigliani: Recycled tires.
Mr. Workman: …of recycled tires. Obviously we’re trying to make as much as possible, avoid the landfill, because if it doesn’t go to California, it comes to us as our raw feed cycle. But every pound that we could make would not have to leave the state of Nevada – this is a brand new process and I wish you’d been there…I don’t know if anybody else from here has been there, it’s as state-of-the-art as exists in the United States. We are supplying the crumb rubber for UNLV’s sports fields expansion which have already been approved…I don’t know how they’re paying for it with the budget cuts, but supposedly it’s going forward. There are some private sports fields going in North Las Vegas this year, again we’re supplying the crumb rubber. And it’s a very specific product that’s known, it’s used in every athletic field – you watch any sports game on television, every stadium that exists there is a layer you don’t see that’s crumb rubber in between the grass, which is supposed to provide some cushioning. So to suggest that it’s not a product that has markets would, in my opinion, not be accurate. So that was just some definition things I wanted to bring out. As I said, Ed did a good job of appointing you with my concerns and giving you some of our arguments. And as he said the main issue probably is this definition…passenger tire, we could talk about the truck tire, about pneumatic tires…our contention is that it’s very cumbersome. Before I address that I’d like to read one sentence that Ed has put in his rules which allows me to believe, I hope not naively, that indeed we can do things here that may go above and beyond SB186. It says here “the health authority may take any appropriate action designed to improve the disposal efficiencies within the solid waste management system.” So for one, I am looking at that thinking that that means this Board and SNHD, if it chooses to, can go above and beyond that which is specifically stated in SB186 and that sentence is a prime reason for what I’m going to present to you. I hope that’s a correct statement…
Chair Giunchigliani: I think it is and I think it goes back to what Member Strickland raised at the very beginning. SB186 was the minimum – it was the floor and we can go beyond that if we choose to.
Mr. Workman: As many of you may be aware, obviously, we were quite instrumental in working with Senator Copening in trying to draft SB186 and the reason that it came about is Nevada was one of the few states that did not have the tire recycling regulations at all in place and the reason was we didn’t have a recycler. The main reason you didn’t have a recycler is you don’t have the population base to generate enough waste tires to make it economically viable for a recycler to come in. Clark County, which I think is 80% of Nevada, had about 1.6 million people and that just about generated the threshold that a company like ours would need to justify its plan. So that’s how this came about. Lots of discussion about passenger tire. Agreed, SB186 talks about passenger tire, Ed put it on the Board with the definition. Why has only the one thing is coming up in SB186 it says that a passenger tire is a vehicle, they defined passenger car – passenger truck tire, passenger car, what is it – so vehicle designed to transport ten people or less. We thought, and we left it alone being there, that encompassed…
Chair Giunchigliani: Trucks…
Mr. Workman: …basically the spectrum of motor vehicles. And you’re going to see in my examples…if I talk about an ambulance, it carries ten people or less, or a tow truck or a UPS truck or a Fed-Ex truck…so we didn’t have issues with what defines a passenger car or a passenger car tire. So to us that wasn’t an issue. Then we addressed it when Ed came about and said let’s put this two-tier system in. We have passenger car tires, which he puts on the top and then we have this pneumatic tire issue. Now every passenger tire is a pneumatic tire, it is filled with gas. Now you have to say what is a pneumatic tire that is not a passenger tire. And in our opinion, the regs don’t clearly make that distinction. Almost 90% of tires, if you take away semi-size tires, and somebody asked for size definition, we’ve worked with the Board to try and establish one and then we decided that might indeed be too limiting and we’ll deal with any tires that come to us that are over that size, 90% of tires that are not semi tires are the size of passenger tires, passenger car tires. If any of you have a four-wheel, a suburban, Toyota Tundra, an Excursion, every UPS truck, no bigger, again excluding semis. Every tow truck, every ambulance, every Fed-Ex truck, United States Postal trucks – they are the size of passenger car tires. So how is it going to be practical at the landfill, or in any space, to say whether it’s shredded or not, that came from a United Parcel truck and this one came from your SUV. It’s very difficult to monitor it; it’s very difficult both from a practical viewpoint to decide what is a pneumatic tire, what is not a passenger tire, etc. That is the reason that we requested the definition that a waste tire should be one that comes from a motor vehicle. Most of the states in the United States use that definition. I’ve attached to you, because we’re constantly referring to Arizona and California as precedent, I have attached to your documents both the California Code and the Arizona State Code defining a waste tire as that which comes from a motor vehicle. I just think it would be much simpler, much easier, avoid all sorts of compliance issues and enforcement issues. That is my first point. And now I go to the point of, as many people brought up, the tires which are shredded or chipped don’t pose a threat to a landfill. I believe Ed brought out that only nine states in America prohibit the shred or chips from going into the landfill. Is that correct, Ed?
Mr. Wynder: According to the Rubber Manufacturers’ Association.
Mr. Workman: But what is not differentiated and is very important, because it was raised by some of the people here, it is correct I have no issues with chipped or shredded tires causing any harm. You know, no I’m not going to say they do, yes they do [indistinguishable comment] and it’s our contention if you have something that can be recycled, aluminum can, coke can, plastic bottle…you know, I know of a company to do it, why not take advantage of it. But in places…almost most of those states, including Arizona, allow it to be used as daily ground cover for that landfill and that is correct – that is a very suitable use, I bet Bob will probably verify that if asked. And that’s part of those 41 states that allow it – but they do not allow it to be co-mingled with the trash which is how Republic would be getting it, whether somebody shreds it up or chips it, they put it in those front-end loaders, they call it, they go like this in the truck and that’s co-mingled waste and that’s gets buried – it doesn’t get used here as an excellent ground cover because there’s no methodology that anybody has…oh, this is just a dumpster of shredded tires, I better put it on the side and cover…use it for my daily cover. It doesn’t exist here. So I just want to bring some clarification to Ed’s concept that nine states, only nine states prohibit it. Most of the states allow it for ground cover, but you can’t co-mingle it, you can’t deliberately shred tires or chip them, mix it with garbage and bury it. Just a little clarification and I think that that’s important. And my argument about asking the Board again to make it simple and just say tires, all the waste tires, altered or not, are not supposed to go into a landfill. It’s not 100%, people are still going to be cutting them, people are still going to throw them in Republic’s dumpsters, they’re still going to get co-mingled with the garbage to some extent but why not eliminate it as much as possible? We are a viable business here, we can handle it with a very proper methodology and make something good out of it. And by the way, crumb rubber is a listed product of industry with a commodity being, I’ll get to that with the financial assurance and everything, but it is…and there are…you can go in the Internet and it can give you sites and you can see the places of crumb rubber, geographic depending upon what size and gradation…
In the regulations that drafted, and I’m aware that Ed has graciously altered the definition of processing, where he took out the phrase that allowed processing tires to be altered, chipped or shredded for the purpose of going to a landfill, he has eliminated the word “landfill” from that, but in the regs as written under the definition…a whole lot was put on the board about saying we’re going to prohibit whole pneumatic tires from the landfill. Again I ask who is going to decide where the cutoff is between passenger car tires and pneumatic tires because they’re not mentioned…you can do it by size, it’s a very specific size and I can understand that, but you can’t, in my opinion, leave it as nebulous as it is because I’m saying that 90% of all tires indeed are passenger car tire sizes. The regs state you can cut the tire into four or more parts. Again are we going to stand there and all of a sudden the tire’s in three parts and we’re not going to know where to put it? You can split it circumferentially, you can cut out the sidewalls including the beads, all of these under the regs would be acceptable methods to put those tires, which are no longer whole, into the landfill. And I would represent that not one of these options would make that shredded able to be eligible for groundcover for Republic without the whole beads, you have the sidewalls. Yes it is selfish of us and self-serving to request that these different defined methods of alterations get eliminated so that we can hopefully get more tires, but I think if we can disallow the altering of the tires it just makes…it’s a motor vehicle tire and you can’t put it in any form except where it’s accidently co-mingled I just think it would make everybody’s life a lot, lot, lot easier. That’s my second issue. I’ll try not to take up too much of your….
Chair Giunchigliani: OK.
Mr. Workman: Ed raised the point that we are petitioning the SNHD to remove crumb rubber from the definition of solid waste. I personally know of no state in the United States that does not specifically exclude it – there maybe some, I know of none. You will be taking that manufactured product, which was quite a bit of money to make, a lot of environmental practices and saying uniquely that is not a product it’s still solid waste. Ed used the example, I believe it was the mulching, until they’re sold under your regulations it is solid waste. I wrote in my letter I have a different example. Chip board, which we’re all familiar with, you know the plywood substitute…it’s made from, you take up the…grind it up, you manufacture the wood product from it. I think that most manufacturers of that wood product would fight hard if somebody went around and said their product, ready to be shipped and being sold everyplace, is a solid waste. As he rightfully pointed out, it is by request for that definition, which I’ve supported by both documentation from Arizona and California, has to do with an internal discussion that the SNHD and my company is having about financial assurance for the closure bonds and my reason for requesting this definition is that indeed so the SNHD in looking at how much money it would cost to clean up my facility if I went out of business, I don’t want them in include the cost of disposing of all my bags of my product which is a listed product of industry. Ed’s contention is it needs to be counted because we’re going to dispose of it and I have to pay for that disposal and Mr. Coyle has been one company that’s given prices, we’ll come in and take all your stuff, we’ll throw it in the garbage. He says the prices of commodities go up and down – and that’s true, that what makes a commodity. But I don’t think oil, on a barrel basis, ever gets to zero, it may go from 70 to 150, but it will never be zero. Steel, recycled steel, anything…this is not to be confused with chipped wood and green product, and paper shred and things like this – this is a manufactured product and I believe the NAC definitions of material derived from a manufactured process supports our request. So that is, and again I said I provided you back up documentation from other states.
We have the issue of tires which are generated in Clark County to be disposed of outside of Clark County. It also comes in part with the gentleman, I think, from the tire store and I don’t know him, his contention about the retailers and I’d like to address that because it’s all part. First of all we do charge a fee for receiving a tire for disposal, it is $0.70 a tire. It is at the lower third of the spectrum of tire recyclers in the United States and it’s number one. And we do…that fee has been pretty standard for quite a long time around the United States. Both Republic Services and us…we did a lot of work to address those concerns that the retailers that are saying you know, this is a monopoly or what’s to protect you, Phoenix Recycling, from all of a sudden putting a sign now it’s two bucks a tire and we’re all stuck. The answer is competition. We believe that the retailer who’s giving Republic its tires, which goes by volume not weight, seven tires to a cubic yard is a national standard, pay Republic to pick it up, even if landfilling was legal, dumping that…paying the fee and dumping the cubage into the Apex landfill is no different and is no more costly to the retailer than having a truck to us and paying us the $0.70. And if we’re wrong, we’re not wrong by more than $0.10 a tire. The company in Santa Fe Springs, California was addressed by one gentleman and they get, that company’s called Lakin, we do business with them…I’m very familiar with their operation which is why I know only a small portion of their shred goes overseas and was correctly pointed out is Korea and Japan, and I’m pretty sure not one pound of it goes to China. Lakin will pick up from a tire retailer here, I think it used to be daily, pretty reasonably, they bring it to a central collection point at night transportation here in Las Vegas, they drive those tires to California and they do it for a very reasonable price. They have most of the national chains, as I mentioned. I know for a fact in some cases they do it for much less money than we do. And they take out, by their count, over 600,000 tires from Clark County to California. That’s finance…that’s competition and we don’t object that it’s a very legitimate place. All I was asking is that the opportunity doesn’t come for what we call diversion, which is pick up a tire here, go to a landfill that is outside the auspices of SNHD, and just dump it – whole tires. Because if the idea is it’s a recognized practice regardless, there’s not one person disagreed with this, whole tires in a landfill is a bad idea. You have the voids, you have disease, you have the methane gases, you have the potential for fires, it doesn’t compress – it is a bad idea. Yes it is permitted in Lincoln County by the DEP, but why support that? Originally it’s very simple to say if we make a mess here let’s deal with it or send it to a recycler. When I talk about going out of state, I’m not saying going out of state to dump it, we’re saying you have very little alternatives, they’re very inexpensive, but let’s make sure the tire companies recycle somewhere, by us, Lakin does a perfectly good job, there’s guys in Utah from that side of the state that do it – we know them all – very credible, responsible people. That’s all I’m asking is that the tires need to get recycled if they’re generated in Clark County, whether by us or anybody else, not dumped in a hole where because it’s outside of its auspices that now it’s legal. And one of my comments, and I guess I’ll agree with Ed, I don’t even see how it can conform to the manifest requirements where the signature of a solid waste disposal facility is required under these regs, and that guy’s outside the county, he can’t even give you that signature. Again I think my would be much easier, does the public good, me, I don’t see how anybody could argue that much.
Basically I have addressed the concerns I wanted to and I thank you for that. Somebody asked a question about tires go to Republic and people just put them in the landfill, are there some mechanisms there…we work closely with Republic, we’re planning on having – we’re just waiting for these regulations to be passed – bins on site where the public can go free, there’s a nice sign on the bins that says these tires will be…
Chair Giunchigliani: Recycled.
Mr. Workman: …recycled at Phoenix Recycling Technologies. Republic and I have an arrangement…we don’t charge them. If they don’t get paid by their customer, we don’t charge them – we take them at no cost. It’s probably half the tires that Bob brings us, I don’t know, are at no charge. We’re not looking to hurt anybody…if we want to be aggressive about this competition thing, I might say to Bob you got to pay us for whatever your bring. No, if they get paid for it, we get paid for it, that’s fair. If they don’t, public brings them to them, I have a nice dumpster…everything goes in, Republic is spending their money to send a truck, bring it to our facility to do the right thing and we don’t charge them at all for that. Or anybody else that was in the same situation. Thank you for hearing me out. I think there are some questions, if not I’ll shut up…I’m sure everybody’s tired of this.
Chair Giunchigliani: It’s important and so I think and I think we’re all spending our time…but I’ll note for the record that we’re back to a quorum. OK. I know, I understand. Are there some questions for Mr. Workman? I just wanted to recapture the issue of the waste tire definition. Motor vehicle versus…
Mr. Workman: Motor vehicle instead of…
Chair Giunchigliani: Having…
Mr. Workman: …having this…
Chair Giunchigliani: …convoluted…
Mr. Workman: …discrepancy between passenger car tire and pneumatic tire. We need to go to MIT to deal with it.
Chair Giunchigliani: Ahhh…
Member Jones: Will a passenger tire then encompass construction vehicles, be it a front-loader or…
Mr. Workman: No, and your…nobody in the…those are called off-the-road tires for the most part and in our industry nobody considers them applicable tires anyway. In the industry most of those big tires, mining tires, if they don’t get resold back to a Caterpillar or somebody like that, those do get landfilled whole and there’s reasons for that, because they are so…and their sidewalls are like six inches thick…they are not susceptible to the hazards of the regular tire – they are too heavy to pick up.
Member Jones: And electric golf carts or…
Mr. Workman: Those we would be happy to take. I’m aware…we’re not looking to put such, I would have liked to, but I’m not looking to put such a tight ribbon around it. If we get tires that we can’t take, that aren’t applicable to recycling, Republic has a dumpster at our facility, we put the tires in it and it gets properly disposed of. Because solid foam tires, racing car tires which are made out of pure rubber, these mining…they’re not, in a practical sense, able to be recycled.
(Member Onyema left the meeting at 11:16am)
Mr. Workman: And by the way, the issue of the junk tire, it was…we support that exemption that somebody asked about the percentages of how much…to our knowledge of the industry – it’s nation-wide, it’s not state-specific – but in total it doesn’t amount to more than about 3% of waste tires and it would be a real pain in the neck to have to take the tire off the aluminum wheel to get to the aluminum and then go to dispose of it. We’re not going to get 100% here no matter what we do, but we can get a lot better. That’s all we’re asking.
Chair Giunchigliani: The issue of crumb rubber. You prefer to have it just eliminated from the definition…
Mr. Workman: The definition of…
Chair Giunchigliani: …of solid waste.
Mr. Workman: …solid waste.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK. I wrote that down…
Mr. Workman: …and I think that’s reasonable because every state in America, to my knowledge, has a specific exemption for it, because it is product of industry.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK. And…
Member Jones: Can I comment on that?
Chair Giunchigliani: Go ahead.
Member Jones: The issue seemed to be the cost of you warranting or having a bond for closure of your business…
Mr. Workman: That’s correct.
Member Jones: …I mean, there has to be some method of determining what the economic cost is of closing down.
Mr. Workman: We had, you see, we believe that logically…our facility is permitted to hold inside it 1,500 tons of our crumb rubber. At $300 a ton, which is roughly the price, that’s $450,000. We believe that if we’re going to go out of business we would sell that crumb rubber, and maybe we don’t get $300, we’ll sell it for $200 or we’ll sell it for $100…but we, logically we would never get to the point where we have to pay the fee of somebody picking it up and throwing it in the landfill because it has a value. SNHD’s contention is, look that may be, but we need to look at what it would cost to close up your entire place. So, we think our point is logical; their point is also logical; one way to eliminate this is another issue with all our equipment, which is worth millions of dollars, but leaving that aside, if it’s outside the definition of solid waste I don’t have to pay the bond, which is significant money, to dispose of something…
Chair Giunchigliani: That you’re going to sell.
Mr. Workman: …that’s valuable. It’s like, you know, you’re charging a guy to clean up, he’s got a giant warehouse chairs…he’ll sell them for something, $5, $10, but you don’t have to pay somebody to throw them in the garbage. We feel it’s not an appropriate situation for that because it is a manufactured product.
Chair Giunchigliani: And…
Mr. Wynder: Madam Chair?
Chair Giunchigliani: Yes, Ed.
Mr. Wynder: Oh, thank you. Our…a couple things. One, these regulations were not written for one specific facility – these are for a facility that can receive a solid waste and process it. The processing from one facility to another may be different and the end product, if you will, of that processing may be different and the value of that may be different. We feel that these regulations are for the industry as a whole. That said, as required by Senate Bill 186, these regulations do allowing for the granting of exemptions or waivers by this Board. Mr. Workman, or any other professional in the industry, could come to the Board and say because of situation X, Y and Z I propose that we be waived or be allowed to consider a portion of the value of X, Y and Z for its offsetting financial assurance amount. And so from our point of view, we have taken a conservative tact that the last thing we want to do is have something happen at a facility, I don’t think it will happen here, he’s got a beautiful facility, but again these aren’t for just one company. We don’t want something to happen at a facility and that ends up in the community having to pay for the cleanup of a really a big mess. And so we’ve put that more conservative language in here in order to protect the community from that possibility.
Chair Giunchigliani: Thank you, Ed. Glenn did you…
Glenn Savage: Yes. Board members, Glenn Savage, environmental health director. Just a little bit of history. In the past, because of certain situations that happened with the management of tires and tire fires and whatever has happened, the Board had directed us that when we started writing regulations, the final financial assurance would always be included in solid waste facilities, whether it’s transfer station, a recycling facility, waste tire type facility…we have done that as Ed was saying. We also have talked with Mr. Workman and others that there are other financial instruments, such as CDs, in which he could possibly put a dollar in and actually get an interest-bearing account and then so you’re actually making money on your own money, potentially, and that could be held in reserve, if you will, if that would so be to happen…find out things didn’t work out and your business failed, you could use that and the interest be submitted or for the Chief Health Officer to use in case something drastic happened. As Ed was saying, we’re not suggesting that Mr. Workman or his company – we would hope that that would never occur – or any of the facilities, but again, I would just remind you that some of the facilities that we’ve had to deal with, AKA Pro Star, which has left behind over 30,000 cubic yards of materials, and at that time they said was not waste – they were viable recyclables – now the county and the health district is in court trying to figure out that nightmare. So again, what the Board’s instructed us, we’ve tried to adhere to as best as possible.
Chair Giunchigliani: And I think that there’s a balancing act that’s going to come in there. I think the debate still does come down to what’s a marketable product versus something that someone perceives as a marketable product and then how you set a value to that. So in our performance bonds, don’t we also have bonds that are required to be put up by the businesses?
Mr. Savage: No we do not.
Chair Giunchigliani: Have we ever looked at that as an alternative to assisting…
Mr. Savage: We’ve used the financial instruments that USCPA and the majority of all the states use…
Chair Giunchigliani: I’m just curious, because the county, I know, uses bonds for a lot, and so I was…Scott, did we ever, is that even a possibility?
Scott Weiss: The way that financial assurance works that can use almost anything as long as it’s available to the district and not able to be taken away. So I think the financial assurance has been used the same as the performance bond currently used for a short term during a project to say if you don’t perform the bond is put on hold. Financial assurance policies, as I’ve looked at them, are very similar to that but these are more long term because these are for organizations that are going to stay in businesses years over years over years, and so it’s just, I think, a terminology between the performance bond and the financial assurance. I think that the end point is exactly the same.
Chair Giunchigliani: So like if we close a gaming establishment, are they allowed to sell their products that they have on site?
Mr. Weiss: They would be allowed to sell the product on site. The, I think it was trying to communicate, I’ll see if I can try to do it…if they’re there to sell it, that’s great. They can use that money for whatever it is that’s been going down the toilet, whatever – it’s their money. If the financial assurance is there and if they walk out of town, and I can maybe ask Steve to address it, any equipment, any supply they have on hand, is not the district – it is still theirs, it’s part of the wind down of the corporation. The district would have no ability, in my opinion, Steve may add to that, to be able to sell anything that they have on site – that would be a wind down of the corporation. We would not have the ability, even if they had a million dollars of crumb rubber in there and they all walked away, the district couldn’t walk in and take that crumb rubber and say well, we’ll sell it on the open market – it’s not ours. That would have to go through, like I said, the wind down of a corporation, which is a legal process that…
Chair Giunchigliani: Is there a notification that the business is going to cease doing business for whatever reason?
Mr. Wynder: Yes, there is. There’s a requirement that thirty days prior to closure that they notify the…
Chair Giunchigliani: And so could you not then just say upon notification…
Member Jones: Where is he? He didn’t come…
Chair Giunchigliani: …the product would be…I’m just trying to figure out how to balance this, because you’re right, we’re not writing a reg for one specific company but we also have one specific company that’s finally doing business and we don’t want to impact them quite…
Mr. Savage: If I may…
Chair Giunchigliani: …because of volume and so forth…
Mr. Savage: …practicality of the matter when facilities do close in the solid waste arena they’re not calling us and saying here’s a thirty-day notice – it just happens. The other thing is that, again, we’re dealing with the solid waste industry – we do not have financial assurance for restaurants or bars or tattoo facilities. This is financial assurance driven toward solid waste, again based upon years of…
Chair Giunchigliani: Have you ever collected?
Mr. Savage: …experience with the US EPA and some of the nightmares that were left behind by the mismanagement of waste and we adopted that.
Chair Giunchigliani: So under that financial assurance have we ever collected any money from anybody that went under?
Mr. Savage: I don’t believe we have ever had to embark that from what I understand.
Member Empey: Pro Star?
Mr. Savage: Pro Star did not have any money available and that’s why we’re in court.
Member Jones: Some type of analysis as to what the hazardous materials are that have to be gotten rid of, I would assume the building is not something that’s has to be gotten rid of, the manufacturing equipment is not something…
Mr. Workman: May I address that?
Member Empey: Even if you look at Pro Star, see what Pro Star has done, for the last nine years we’ve been trying to get that mess cleaned up. It’s still the same damn way and it’s got putrifucation in it and they won’t do anything. They go out and say, well it’s ours you can’t sell it. But it is a public health hazard. And we can’t move on it.
Chair Giunchigliani: Does it…
Member Empey: I don’t want to see that happen again. I don’t think this gentleman or the rest of them would do that.
Mr. Campbell: Generally speaking, what happens then…we’ve had a couple of businesses go out of business is they notify us that they’re going to go out of business and then what we do in a case like that is we will release their financial assurance back to them to clean it up and monitor to make sure that it’s been done appropriately.
Chair Giunchigliani: You mitigate it.
Mr. Campbell: Yes, to mitigate, to clean up the site. Nevada Forest Products is probably a good example. They had a financial assurance document with us…they went out of business, they notified us in advance, we released it so they could use that money to clean up the site to the satisfaction of the property owner. So that’s generally what happens.
Chair Giunchigliani: Mr. Workman?
Mr. Workman: Madam Chair, I’m sorry to…I’m not suggesting that we’re not obligated to a financial assurance bond. We understand that and when it was talked about Pro Star, they took in recyclable materials, and you should not be paid for that. Just like we have to pay for the cleanup, I talk about the 1,500 tons of our…what I’m looking for is for the finished product to be excluded from the calculation as it is in every other state. We still have to come up with financial assurance to get rid of the 42,000 tires that would be the raw material of our recyclable materials. So we understand that. I’m not looking to get rid of my obligation to the county. We have that in force, we do have a CD in there, we know that the equipment has to be taken down. County’s point is very well taken that Jason if you have $5 million of equipment in there, it’s not ours – maybe it’s your bank’s or somebody else and he’s right. So we’re not looking to get out of it, we’re just looking to take one portion of the calculation away because it is a finished material. That’s all. I wouldn’t get out of posting a bond for the county…we have one in place and we’re happy with it. We’re not fighting it.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK. Thank you. Linda?
Member Strickland: No.
Chair Giunchigliani: And we’re back to having no quorum.
Mr. Workman: I have an issue with the altering.
Chair Giunchigliani: Yes, the altering. I hate to say this…we don’t have a quorum right now. Do we know if we have anybody else…I saw Jimmy here. Can he sit in for anybody or he…Lonnie’s doing…
Dr. Sands: Lonnie’s…the only at-large member we don’t have seated is a nurse and both Barbara Ruscingno and Mattocks are out. And then the rest are physicians.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK.
Member Fairchild: I guess we continue this…
Chair Giunchigliani: I guess we have to continue this and maybe we might have to do an interim meeting or something between…I don’t know because we have the budget on here that we have to hear…
Dr. Sands: We’re going to have to do something about the budget because that needs to be approved before April 1st.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK. Linda has a comment.
Member Strickland: I just wanted to ask, if we’re going to be…since we need to bring this back again, I would like to make sure that your, the PowerPoint presentation you’re giving us here today is part of the materials that are brought back to us so that I can go to your arguments in relation to the language of the proposed regulations and I’m assuming that his documents were also included in here. I just had a hard time opening this at home, so I had a difficult time going through it.
Chair Giunchigliani: I did, too, that’s why I printed off a handful of pages that I normally.
Member Strickland: It’s one of those things I wish we were back to paper…
Chair Giunchigliani: I know.
Member Strickland: …because this is hard to read.
Chair Giunchigliani: It’s hard to read.
Member Christensen: We need two documents up there.
Chair Giunchigliani: Then how do you go from your…
Member Strickland: We do. And you almost need to tab then so you can see where this argument goes with this language and see what their comments where.
Chair Giunchigliani: I think part of it is basically is a tire is a tire is a tire and maybe make it simpler on that definition of motor vehicle…so as we come back, we’re not going to be able to take action today. Take a look at that…I think Senator Hardy came up with some language that we could…I played around with it a little bit as well. Maybe even have for us when we compute our financial assurance what do you exactly look for so we understand what his argument is versus what you’re trying to, at least for me. Bless you. Whatever we can do to make sure as many tires can be recycled here in Clark County instead of encouraging people driving the product out of here would make sense if we could…
Mr. Workman: Madam Chair, my request just that the Clark County tires have to be recycled, yet by us preferably, in Utah, anybody…
Chair Giunchigliani: I think that at least gets us a step in the right direction…
Mr. Workman: …but don’t let them dump the whole tire across the street, just because it’s not under your jurisdiction. If it was in your jurisdiction, it wouldn’t be allowed.
Chair Giunchigliani: Correct.
Mr. Campbell: I just want to remind the Board, though, that there is a specific section of the Senate Bill that would not allow us to dictate how tires are disposed outside of our jurisdiction, outside the jurisdiction of the health district. That they have to be, our regulations cannot prevent the lawful disposal of a tire outside…
Member Fairchild: Jurisdiction.
Mr. Campbell: …jurisdiction. So if another facility, another jurisdiction allows a landfill to accept waste tires the stipulation in the Senate Bill says we cannot interfere with that.
Chair Giunchigliani: Correct. I think Boulder landfill…they made a stipulation as an operator, I heard they were going to make a stipulation that they will not accept.
Mr. Campbell: And they…that’s part of the operational plan.
Chair Giunchigliani: I don’t know about Lincoln County, because that’s where Mesquite goes, correct?
Member Fairchild: Right. It’s under the guidelines of NDEP.
Mr. Campbell: Yeah, that would be under the NDEP guidelines, and that would be something they’d have to work out with NDEP.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK. So NDEP could still change their reg to also state that they could do X, Y or Z and then that operator would be tied to it Donna, is that how they work?
Member Fairchild: I believe that to be correct.
Mr. Campbell: But according to the Senate Bill, NDEP does not have to change, does not have to adopt regulations…
Chair Giunchigliani: Correct.
Mr. Campbell: …it’s only for solid waste management authorities, in other words health districts and there’s only two health districts in the state that have to have waste tire management regulations.
Member Fairchild: That’s us and…
Mr. Campbell: Us and Washoe, that’s the only two.
Mr. Wynder: Interestingly enough, that approval for waste tires was recent within the last calendar year. In fact many have been issued after the Senate Bill was signed in law.
Chair Giunchigliani: NDEP?
Mr. Wynder: That’s correct.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK.
Mr. Workman: But I think the issues could be addressed, as Dennis said, about lawful disposal, but more constitutes lawful disposal of a waste tire, that I don’t know if lawful disposal was defined by the county as a recyclable of some sort, then depositing of whole tires whether it’s permitted or not and…
Chair Giunchigliani: I think we still got a few things to think about here. But overall it sounds like there’s a majority of acceptance to most of the product, the regulation itself. And we’ve got another couple weeks that maybe it can be fleshed out a little bit more. I apologize to the audience as well…and all the hard work that’s done here. I don’t know what we’re going to do about the budget. Let me close the hearing if there’s no one else that wishes to testify on this.
Member Fairchild: Mr. Campbell, just…I’ve read through this material twice now and still just a tad confused because the City of Mesquite does operate the landfill outside in Lincoln County…
Mr. Campbell: That’s correct.
Member Fairchild: The question became is Mesquite exempted or how do we go through the exemption process, but I guess the question in my mind is because we’re outside of the, what is it fifty to sixty miles, do we as a Board need to put some kind of language in there, because I couldn’t find it, to exempt Mesquite currently…
Mr. Wynder: The issue is the Senate Bill did two things: it required these regs but it also put new law into the NRS. And that new law says that if you’re in the county that has a permitted waste tire management facility, waste tires generated from that county may not be disposed of in a municipal solid waste landfill in the state of Nevada. So these regulations can’t do anything…that’s an NRS thing that I’m not sure how Virgin Valley Disposal and the City of Mesquite are going to deal with the waste tires that they generate.
Mr. Campbell: And in your particular case, I would suggest that you might want to have some discussions with NDEP because they are the oversight agency for your particular landfill and it’s kind of an unusual situation, but it just so happens that your landfill is just over the county line.
Member Fairchild: Well, maybe we can annex them.
Chair Giunchigliani: Consolidation. And, go ahead Linda.
Member Strickland: I just had one other request. I know I requested the PowerPoint be in here, and I know that Shelli does always a wonderful job with our minutes, but as much detail as can be placed in the minutes with respect to comments made by those that came to the podium would be greatly appreciated.
Chair Giunchigliani: And also, wouldn’t our franchisee, they…our franchisees, plural I guess, wouldn’t they have to apply for a new permit as a solid waste collector of tires?
Mr. Wynder: Under these regulations they would need a permit as a hauler of waste tires.
Chair Giunchigliani: That was the question I had, and I’m not going to take up now, but we’ve got some more time, I guess. But because we created a definition for a hauler, that requires them to already now to have another permit and so how does that work out business-wise? That could get costly…
Mr. Wynder: Well, I’ll let them speak to the business side. But the concept of a hauler of waste tires has been in Nevada Administrative Code, or NAC, for quite some time, and that is not new to these regulations.
Chair Giunchigliani: And that is the same definition then from NAC that we have here?
Mr. Wynder: It…more or less, roughly the same definition although slightly different.
Chair Giunchigliani: Maybe if you provide that you could give us that as a comparison to look at. Because I had a question…why does it not only for materials derived from waste tires, then it goes into across state boundaries. And I don’t know if that’s the current language or not.
Mr. Wynder: Yeah, that goes back to NAC.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK. They have to get a new permit, pay for another permit. What happens with their permit number, I mean, how much, how costly can that be?
Mr. Campbell: There is, and if you look at our current fee schedule, there already is an existing fee for a waste tire hauler. It’s just we never, in the past, have implemented that fee because we didn’t have regulation to back it up. But once Senate Bill 186 came into effect, and by developing these regulations, now we have the ability to assess a fee and a permit…to issue permits for waste tire haulers. And basically the permit, they’re already a solid waste management company, they have a lot of trucks already that have DOT numbers and our permits will match the DOT numbers so we’ll be able to track them that way.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK, but under our definition it also allows a person who is directed by someone to transport waste tires for disposal, so SNHD directed Republic or whoever else might they would not have to go through the permit process?
Mr. Wynder: Not for that particular shipment. That was put in there with an eye towards community clean up, BLM clean ups, etc. Not necessarily with the company that would be shipping tires or transporting tires on a daily/weekly basis.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK. Thank you. I apologize. So how do we deal with the budget? Can we do a phone conference call, or call a special meeting next week? Because I know by law you have to send it to the county for us to then send it to the state.
Dr. Sands: Right.
Mr. Weiss: By statute.
Dr. Sands: By statute.
Chair Giunchigliani: And that’s by April 1st?
Dr. Sands: And I guess my question is…
Mr. Smith: Well, we could continue the meeting.
Chair Giunchigliani: That’s what I’m thinking. Let’s not adjourn, simply recess. And we could recess to call of the chair and we could find out how and when we can get everyone together, at least a majority…
Mr. Smith: We need to give as much notice, obviously, to the public…
Chair Giunchigliani: To the public…
Mr. Smith: …as we possibly can.
Shelli Clark: Madam Chair? Valery’s calling Councilman Barlow’s office right now, as he was supposed to be here. So she’s going to call and see if we can get him to call in.
Chair Giunchigliani: And I didn’t see…
Mrs. Clark: Commissioner Weekly had another appointment – he wasn’t able to be here.
Chair Giunchigliani: Right. I don’t know how long it went, but he might be available now, too.
Mrs. Clark: OK.
Chair Giunchigliani: So everybody kind of hang here for a second, if we can at least resolve that part. Do you want to talk briefly about the budget, Scott, we can go to that agenda item?
Dr. Sands: Well, before we go to that I just want to be sure that staff has clear direction about what particularly…you listed off a couple and I just want to be sure we have clear direction what items you’d like staff to come back with some recommendation.
Chair Giunchigliani: I think, personally, wherever we can look at a motor vehicle tire in a little better sense, because then it captures more than just…let’s see…what we can do to look at the financial assurance so we understand what we’re needing at that part of it, I still have questions…truly on crumb rubber, I don’t understand why it’s a solid waste once it’s been put into a manufacturing form, so that’s something still we can maybe…
Mr. Savage: Madam Councilman, Chair…long day already. I’ve just had some discussion, not to interrupt or anything, but I think maybe we can work that out with the financial assurance, and I asked Mr. Workman if it’s possible he can tie in some of his materials into contracts or something that will give us some clear understanding that it’s a biodegradable product that’s going out the door to a further marketplace – he’s going to look into that. So I’ll be talking with staff about maybe how we can tweak the financial assurance about what’s viable versus, again, what is waste material that’s sitting and waiting and waiting, which again we’ve been burned on before. So we’ll be working on that, along with these other definitions.
Chair Giunchigliani: OK, thank you. Does that help you out, Scott?
Mr. Weiss: Yes.
Mr. Wynder: Yes.
Chair Giunchigliani: Thank you, we appreciate your patience with us.
