The other day, I found a tire on the corner of my block, just sitting there. I drive down the road behind Edison High school, which is I think is Mascher or Quasi-2nd street, fairly frequently and I'll usually pass about three hundred or more discarded tires.

Dumping tires is a Philadelphia pass time.

Each year, the Streets department holds a tire round up for two months or so, affording community groups like ours in Fishtown a chance to earn some money and get rid of the dumped tires in our area. We did pretty well this year, 1000 tires for $500. Think about that 1,000 over two Saturdays in Fishtown and some parts of Kensington. I'm sure that all of the other community groups that participated found similar booty on our streets (Tires are really, really freaking dirty and often contain some undefined liquid in the wheel well that doesn't taste great).

Unfortunately, our collective haul is not a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of tires that are out there. I suggest a solution, which is really just an extended version of the tire round up program. (Which may well already exist but did not appear on repeated google and other searches so if it did please let me know).

When you buy a tire, you the city or state collects a $1.00 refund fee per tire from you, like other cooler states have for bottles and cans. The city or state kicks in $1.00 for a total of $2.00 per tire. At each city dump site, they take the tires every day, on Saturdays, etc. You get $2.00 per tire. We've created an incentive for your enterprising youth, out-of-work-but-industrious Philadelphians or anyone who just wants to get rid of tires on the streets. I think that the prices for raw materials around the globe may even allow this policy to pay for itself.

Clearly, we'll have a problem with unscrupulous garages who'll just capitalize on this problem by collecting money for tires that they're supposed to get rid of anyway. However, I believe we could come up with some methodology to police the practice. Frankly, I'm not well-versed on the restrictions on garages for tire disposal.

Granted, I'd hate to put the FNA and other tire round-uppers out of business, but I think we can virtually eliminate spare tire on the streets with something like this. I think back to my days with my friends scrounging around for cans to take to Penn Treaty Metals on Marlborough street so that we could buy a pack of tennis balls to play stickball. It takes a lot of cans to get a buck, especially back then. However, we picked up a lot of litter and made a couple of bucks.

A continuous tire round-up funded by the city could make a difference.

Feel free to suggest changes, point out glaring flaws or, if you're a legislator/councilperson implement.