Mike Shaffer, the director of sales at Liberty Tire Co. in Pittsburgh, said he’s been in the tire recycling business for 16 years, but it was the first time he’s ever seen “this many kids working so hard and getting down and dirty” in a filthy tire dump.

“It’s incredible — absolutely incredible,” he said. “I’ve seen groups of people working together before, but usually there’s only a handful of kids in the crowd. It’s a really, really great thing that they’re doing for the environment here.”

Shaffer is coordinating the transportation of the tires to a cryogenic recycling plant in Braddock, where they will be sorted. Not all of the tires collected will be suitable for recycling, he said. About 5 percent of the 140 million tires that Liberty Tire collects each year are used for tire-derived fuel, which, when mixed with coal and wood, burns twice and long and twice as hot as coal, but with less emissions. Some of the tires — the worst of the worst — cannot be recycled or even used for TDF.

“Tires that are beyond our cleaning abilities, are contaminated or are odd sizes such as off-road, airplane or tractor tires, will end up in a monofill, which is a specially designed landfill consisting solely of tires,” he said. “They are buried, but are accessible in the future when we develop the capabilities to process them.”

Funding by the Milken Family Foundation will be used to pay for processing the tires, Shaffer said. Liberty Tires is providing transportation free of charge.

After three hours, students who participated in the clean-up project were tired, filthy dirty and smelled like the stagnant water trapped inside the tires. As they boarded the buses to return to their schools and then head home, Kinney called it “fun,” but said many parents, including her own, would probably opt to burn the clothes in lieu of washing them.

“It was a good time and I got to meet a lot of new people from other schools in our district,” she said. “It was like getting out of school for a field trip, only better because we actually did something to help out the environment.”

Penni Schaefer can be reached at 724-6370 or by e-mail at pschaefer@meadvilletribune.com.