Scrap Tire Regulations - House Bill 3854

Illegal tire disposal has been a rampant problem in Texas for years. More than 36 million tires are discarded each year in Texas, roughly one and a half tires for every person residing in the state. If not transported and disposed of properly, these tires can lead to dangerous outcomes including costly, environmentally hazardous tire piles and increased fire, pollution, and public health and safety risks, such as increases in vector-borne illnesses like Zika, West Nile, and dengue fever.

Illegal dumping is often a result of unlicensed scavengers culling and stealing used tires from generators then dumping their rejects. These tires are transported illegally and dumped, costing the state millions of dollars in cleanup.

Illegally dumped tires are very specific problem for the City of Houston.

House Bill 3854 by Rep. Armando Walle would have amended the Health and Safety Code to require the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to require a bond or other financial assurance as a condition of issuing a registration for the transportation, storage, or processing of scrap tires. The bill would have required the amount of the bond or other financial assurance to be sufficient to cover the reasonable expenses of an immediate remedial or removal action related to a hazardous substance at a scrap tire site.

HB 3854 would have required TCEQ to issue a registration insignia to each transporter of used or scrap tires transported for storage or disposal. The bill would have required the transporter to display the insignia on each vehicle used to transport tires under the registration and sets an insignia to expire annually on a date specified by TCEQ.

• The bill would have authorized TCEQ to adopt rules for issuing duplicate and multiple insignia.
• The bill would have required TCEQ to require a transporter to submit an annual report on the records maintained by the transporter to TCEQ in an electronic format using a form developed by TCEQ.
• The bill would have made a transporter who fails to submit an annual report ineligible to receive the annual registration insignia and subjected the transporter to revocation of the registration.

In 2015 the City reinstated its own local program for enforcing regulations around the proper storage, transportation and disposal of scrap tires. While this bill failed to pass, Rep. Walle continues to push for scrap tire illegal dumping abatement programs.