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STEUBEN TOWNSHIP —

During his junior year at Maplewood High School, Nathan Renaudin started looking for a senior project. “I wanted to do something that would really matter to me — and something where I could learn,” the mud-spattered senior recalled late Friday morning. “I talked to Mr. Jason Drake, my biology teacher, who I admire a lot.”

In a collaborative effort that started last summer, Renaudin and fellow seniors Samantha Taylor, Kevin Sawatsky and Case Kunick took Drake’s suggestion and ran with it. Friday, science went into motion at Bossard’s Salvage Yard, where an estimated 8,000 tires were moved out of massive piles and into even more massive semi-trailers.

While all four students worked together to make Friday’s clean-up happen, their work still isn’t done. “They all have separate topics they’re studying themselves,” Drake explained.

Approximately 200 students from Maplewood and Saegertown high schools donned boots, gloves and matching T-shirts to load the tires. Carefully woven together to get the maximum number into the minimum space, the tires are headed to Youngstown, Ohio, where they will be recycled in a processing facility recently purchased by Enviva Materials LLC, a Richmond, Virginia-based materials recovery and processing company.

“Just think,” Drake said. “If every high school in the state of Pennsylvania in their environmental science class chose one pile of tires every two or three years and worked with their local Department of Environ-mental Protection office through a company like Enviva, where would we be in 10 years? That would be really neat.”

Bill Bossard agrees wholeheartedly. “People have to have a way to get rid of their junk tires,” he said of one of the inevitable by-products of his salvage business. “It’s been hard over the past 15 or 20 years. You haven’t been able to get rid of them.”

He isn’t alone. The Department of Environmental Protection estimates that 270 million to 300 million tires are piled in countless locations across the United States; an estimated 10.5 million to 12 million are piled in Pennsylvania alone, Drake explained. “The state really doesn’t recognize a pile unless it’s over 10,000 tires,” he added. “I’m thinking that there have to be more, because if you start adding up all those piles of 500 to 5,000, there’s a substantial amount.”

His worst suspicions have been confirmed by the number of people who have contacted him with stories of a thousand or more tires in piles on their property. “I’m not talking one,” he said. “I think there are a lot of them out there.”

Local support from Crawford Conservation District and Allegheny College’s Creek Connections was joined by a grant from the Milken Family Foundation and Enviva’s offer to transport the tires loaded Friday for free and waive its normal processing fees.

According to Thomas Meth of Enviva, who was on hand for the cleanup, recycling used tires is an idea whose time has definitely come. “If you don’t treat a tire, it can potentially be a hazard,” he explained. However, once the metal used in the construction of a tire have been removed by a primary shredder, there are all sorts of options. “You can shred or granulate it,” he continued. “You can use rubber crumb or rubber mulch for playgrounds — or for tracks in stadiums. There are lots of good uses for it, so there’s really no good reason to just leave used tires somewhere.”

The process, he added, is expensive. “A big portion of a tire is steel, so when you shred a tire the blades have to be replaced or sharpened often.” However, there is definitely hope. The market has begun to understand the value of rubber mulch. “It’s safe for playgrounds, which is a great way to use it,” he said. “It is a business model that works.”