You might think it’s strange to take a few million tires and throw them into the ocean to help marine life. But in the 1970s it seemed like a bright idea for those in charge of the business.
In 1972, Broward Artificial Reef Inc. (BARINC) came up with a plan that would eventually lead to disaster: to combine the problem of discarding vehicle tires with the desire to create new nests for fish. The plan was to take about 2 million old tires and have them sink to the ocean floor where fish would certainly flock to “artificial reefs”.
The idea has received a surprising amount of attention. More than 100 privately owned boats and the US Navy’s USS Thrush voluntarily participated in this campaign. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co decided this was just the project they needed to get involved in and donated tires and equipment to tie the tires together while other tires came from landfills.
Goodyear liked the idea so much that they even bought a Goodyear blimp to drop a gold-painted tire into the ocean as a ceremonial opening to the project. A press release from the company stated that the tires would “provide a haven for fish and other aquatic species” and cited “the excellent properties of scrap tires as reef material.”
The idea, though well-intentioned, unfortunately turned into a disaster, a literal underwater wreck. Years later, in 2007, Ray McAllister, professor of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University, said, “The really good idea was to provide habitat for sea creatures so we could double or triple the marine life in the area,” he said. “It didn’t work that way. Now looking back. I see this is a bad idea.”
We now know that immersing man-made materials to create reefs is not as clean as it seems. Shipwrecks are the most common form of artificial reefs, and there are ships that are deliberately sunk to provide habitat for sea creatures. What was wrong with throwing a tire into the ocean was that it wasn’t considered how light the tires were and how much of it could be dragged and shattered.
Only a few types of sponges grew on the tires, and these were also quite sparse. Worse still, the currents have loosened many tires. The loose tires continued to crush other nearby natural corals as they glided on the ocean floor, hindering the growth of coral reefs. In short, as William Nuckols, coordinator of a cleanup effort, put it in 2007, “a perpetually killing coral destroyer machine” had been created.
Volunteers and various groups tried to recover the tires as the project turned out to be unsuccessful, but you can imagine the scale of this task. The US military was also involved in the cleanup and was able to remove 72,000 tires before Industrial Divers Corporation was contracted to collect more. Although hundreds of thousands of tires have been removed from the seafloor, hundreds of thousands more remain on the seafloor.
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