Over the past few decades, some people had the bright idea to build artificial reefs with tires. Now when I first head this, I imagined little colorful rubber plants and rocks – what a great idea!

No, it didn’t mean this, well not in the case of Osborne Reef, off the coast of Fort Lauderdale. In the 1970s, over 200 million tires were ‘reused’ and clipped together with steel clips and ceremoniously dumped in an effort to replicate a reef that game fish would inhabit.

These ‘steel clips’ were corrosive and the tires escaped and started floating here, there and everywhere, destroying whatever algae or life forms that had come to live on them, marking the whole event as a failure.

This reef was dubbed an environmental disaster, as it has ended up doing more harm than good in the Florida waters. The whole event was like a fish on a bicycle – it just didn’t and wouldn’t work!

Luckily this year, the United States military took part in a massive clean up operation. They used the opportunity of this clear up operation, as a real life diving and recovery exercise so that it did not incur any costs to the state. It was a win-win situation for everyone and ended up helping the military train and the environmental happiness of the Florida coast.

Actually many artificial tire reefs, around the world have been unsuccessful, resulting in there being tens of thousands of tires on the beaches around the world to clear up and causing damage to existing real reefs. The Ocean Conservancy, even go as far to say that they don’t know of any successful artificial tire reefs.

Make sure recycled tires are put to good use! Rubber mulch is one the most innovative and environmentally friendly way of recycling tires.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Environment, Recycle, recycled tires. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.