DC’s Tire-Dumping Epidemic

Eric Hayes is no stranger to trash. The 55-year-old Barry Farm resident has picked up garbage from the roads, sidewalks and green spaces of his neighborhood every week — sometimes every day — for a decade. There’s not much plastic pollution that surprises him anymore.

But late last year, Hayes and his neighbors woke up to find that someone had come along to Pomeroy Road SE and dumped 70 car tires.

“There were tires in the street, there were tires on the sidewalk,” Hayes said. “Basically — it was a lot of tires.”

Hayes’ experience is far from an isolated incident. Trinidad resident René Bryce-Laporte wrote on X earlier this month that he counted 79 tires while on a morning walk around the Ward 5 neighborhood with his dog. He also posted photos of a truck full of tires, writing that he and his neighbors had seen the vehicle return over and over to dump tires, often near homes.

“It is nasty, inconsiderate, disrespectful and illegal,” Bryce-Laporte wrote. 

Just Past the Guardrail

Anyone who regularly drives along Interstate 295, also called the Anacostia Freeway, can often spot tires sitting just off the shoulder on the side of the road. Nathan Harrington, who leads Ward 8 Woods Conservancy, an organization that hires Ward 8 residents facing employment barriers for forest remediation work, noted the tire problem extends beyond the freeway.

He’s now identified at least two spots along the highway just north of Pennsylvania Avenue SE where hundreds of tires lay among the trees.

“It’s depressing to look at,” Harrington said. “It makes it seem like nobody cares, nobody’s paying attention.”

Because there are so many in one spot, Harrington thinks they were likely dumped there by a commercial hauler trying to avoid fees for proper disposal. He pointed out a few tires lying close to the road that still had dried grass clippings on top of them — it was a sign that the wheels had been there at least since the fall, when the grass would have been mowed.

Why 100 Tires Are Not Good Neighbors

Massive piles of tires pose both safety and health risks for people living nearby. For one thing, rubber tires stacked together are a fire hazard. Tires don’t catch fire very easily, but when they do, the flames tend to spread quickly, producing toxic smoke and becoming difficult to put out. 

“If we have a dry spell and somebody throws their cigarette down here as they drive past and it lands on one of these tires — the whole thing could go up,” Harrington said.

Tires also contain chemicals and heavy metals, some of which are carcinogenic. When they break down, those toxins can slowly leach into soil and groundwater.

Above all, tires present a perfect honeymoon destination for mosquitoes to breed in because they collect stagnant water. The bugs are more than just annoying — they can carry diseases, including West Nile Virus, which had 23 documented cases in D.C., Maryland and Virginia last year.

DPW Removes 11 Tons of Debris — And There’s More Left

Harrington said he started “beating the drum” about the tires and trash along I-295 about a year ago. He sent emails to the Department of Public Works (DPW) and got in touch with D.C. Council staffers working on the committees for environment and public works.

Seeing little change, he started an online petition on Dec. 18, calling on DPW and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to do a thorough cleanup of the area and set up a schedule for regular trash removal. Two days later, according to an update added to the petition on Dec. 20, Harrington got a personal call from DPW Director Timothy Spriggs saying that cleanup along the freeway would take place in January.

Between Jan. 10 and Feb. 5, DPW collected 11 tons of debris from along the I-295 corridor, Spriggs said in an early February interview. In an emailed response to questions, DPW spokesperson Nancee Lyons said that the agency’s cleanup had removed between 200 and 300 tires.

“We were alerted to tires through service requests [and] through direct activation by our employees, and as soon as we became aware of the tires on the side of the roadway, we began to make preparations to get them removed,” said Reginald May, DPW’s deputy administrator of Solid Waste Management.

In the two spots near Pennsylvania Avenue SE, the tires remained untouched on Feb. 21, when Informer reporters went to investigate the site. 

Lyons, the DPW spokesperson, did not initially respond to an email The Informer sent Feb. 6 that asked specifically about one of the spots, providing a location marker. After the Informer sent a follow-up email that included a marker for the other spot, Lyons responded on Feb. 26 that the agency was “checking out the new location.”

Rubber Reminders of Gaps in the System

Part of the issue, Harrington said, is that the 311 platform doesn’t provide an option to mark a location that doesn’t have an address. For a site with more than 100 tires on the northbound side of I-295 just past Pennsylvania Avenue SE, the closest location a submitter can choose is a home on Nash Street SE. From outside that house, the problem isn’t visible.

“You can go into the app and try to drop a pin at the exact spot, but it will default to the nearest building that has an address, which in this case is on the other side of the fence on a street that’s not accessible [from the highway],” Harrington said. “So then, whoever’s responding to that request would go to that address, not see the dumping, and close the request, saying ‘we didn’t see anything.’ … It’s a flaw with the entire system.”

Residents submitted 70 service requests to DPW about the areas around I-295 and Kenilworth Avenue in 2023, according to an email from Lyons. Harrington said he had made at least two 311 calls about the problem that had been marked “closed” without cleanup being done at the spot he was trying to report, despite leaving a description in the notes section.

In general, Harrington said wooded areas along I-295 have fallen through the cracks in agency efforts to keep the District clean.

“The DC Department of Transportation and Department of Public Works have shrugged off responsibility for the grassy median and shoulders and wooded areas that line the road,” he wrote in his petition. “Their neglect has allowed hundreds of tires and thousands of pounds of litter [to] pile up in areas designed as environmental buffer zones.”

Lyons said in an interview that “most of the property along 295 is federal property.” But D.C. government maps show that the boundaries of the National Park Service land and other federal properties mostly don’t extend all the way to the highway, leaving a strip of green space in between. There are only a few places, such as a stretch of about 1500 feet just north of 11th St. NE, where the borders of Anacostia Park or other federal lands reach right up to I-295’s guardrails.

DDOT owns the roadway itself. And what about the half-mile stretch just north of Pennsylvania Avenue SE, where Harrington found two huge collections of tires? It appears to fall squarely within the lines of District-owned highway land.

Enforcement Efforts Fall Short

NPS has seen its fair share of tire dumping, including in several relatively recent high-profile incidents. Members of Ward 8 Woods found a mountain of 3,000 tires dumped into Anacostia Park from an I-295 overpass just over a year ago. In 2019, someone left 1,000 tires on a block of E Street SE across from Fort Dupont Park. 

In both cases, the enormity of the piles drew attention and cleanup began quickly. The incident in 2019 also led to an arrest.

While only MPD can actually arrest someone, enforcement of anti-dumping laws spans a few different agencies. The Department of Energy and Environment has a program called the DumpBusters, which helped track down the 2019 tire dumper. DPW’s enforcement efforts come from the Solid Waste Education and Enforcement Program (SWEEP), which Spriggs said assigns two inspectors to each ward. Both teams work with the three officers in MPD’s Environmental Crimes Unit.

But Davis, the head of Pope Branch Restoration Alliance and a longtime Ward 7 resident, said the District hasn’t devoted enough resources to stop the dumping that goes on in her community.

“These folks do a really good job, but they don’t have enough people, and I don’t think they have the funds that they need,” Davis said. “I’m experiencing almost the same amount — 250 tires — each and every January. So from January to January, somebody is dumping these tires.”

Since 2019, Anacostia Riverkeeper has cataloged more than 11,000 pounds’ worth of tires collected in cleanups around the watershed. Last year, the organization worked with a team of graduate students from George Washington University to analyze the issue. 

Their report attributed the tire dumping largely to private haulers looking to avoid the “tipping fees” private entities have to pay to drop trash off at D.C.’s transfer stations or the tire recycling center in Baltimore. The District’s “tipping fee” increased in 2019 from $50 per ton of waste to $60.62 per ton. 

“With this fee increase, more and more small tire retailers use unlicensed haulers to dispose of their tires because they charge a far lower fee,” the report’s summary reads. “Those unauthorized carriers then have little responsibility to properly dispose of the tires, and will illegally dump in areas like parks that are easy to access and not well monitored — many of which are near the Anacostia River and its tributaries, especially in Wards 7 and 8.”

One More Symptom of Environmental Racism

Harrington’s petition notes that the highway itself was built through those communities in the 1960s, breaking apart neighborhoods, eliminating access to the waterfront and creating harmful air and noise pollution. He sees the tires — and all the debris dumped in green spaces east of the river — as part of the bigger story about environmental racism in D.C., and the city’s failure to remove them as a continuation. 

“People are driving through… this might be the only part of this side of the city that they see,” Harrington said. “It contributes to an impression of D.C., especially east of the river, of being polluted and neglected.”

Hayes — the Barry Farm resident who had 70 tires dumped on his street — said it took DPW more than a month to pick up the tires after he reported them via 311. He partly attributed that long timeline to “a miscommunication,” saying that the agency typically responds to problems quickly. After 10 years of systematically picking up bags upon bags of trash, Hayes is very familiar with DPW, and said he didn’t have many complaints before this.

Still, he didn’t think that kind of mistake would happen in some wealthier, whiter parts of the city.

“If 70 tires were dumped on city land between the National Cathedral and St. Albans school, there is no way you can convince me that those tires will be there for a month,” Hayes said. “It just wouldn’t happen.”

Just a week after DPW collected those tires, someone — the same person, Hayes suspects — came along and dumped 16 more. This time, the agency addressed the issue right away. But Hayes said he doesn’t know of any cameras or other efforts to stop it from happening again. 

In the meantime, he maintains his regular routine, picking up the trash that lands in his neighborhood. He’s not sure how long he’ll continue — he’s pulled his back before and had to go to urgent care a few times. But for now, he keeps at it, because he doesn’t “believe that kids should have to walk to school and see a bunch of trash.”

“People want to do the right thing, and they want to live a certain way,” Hayes said. “These tires and stuff like that — you just can’t let people believe that that is the only way to live.”

This story originally appeared in the Washington Informer, a Black, woman-owned multimedia news organization serving residents of the D.C. region.