What Can I Do with Old Tires?

You said you offered them for free, so you've been down this path....

15 inch pickup tires are getting rare a y more, and so very many farm implements use this size tire. If they are bald but serviceable, finding a farm audience for that size should get you a buck a tire these days? Not if they are cracked or so...

Paul

We turn them inside out and use them to hold mineral and salt blocks for our stock.
I also took five over sized, off road ones and turned them inside out, primed and painted them bright colors, and planted them up with flowers. Inside out they are taller, and kind of flute out at the top, like a large urn.
You just cut off one side wall, and pop them around.

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Debi

Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you will be criticized anyway.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt

Whoa Thanks! Dog beds! My pups are outgrowing their one bed and want to use mine. I can make them 2 lovely beds, goat toys for my future girls, a platform out of another few (maybe even a deck for the pond), stop erosion on whatever new gulleys are created this year (will be first rainy season since dozer work), planters, fence post holders... you guys rock! Feel like I just stocked up on building materials. Paydirt

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Tiny Forest ~ my tiny blog

and a little pond and a child's teeter totter! I can make those to sell. omg. what a bonanza!

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Tiny Forest ~ my tiny blog

Trash to treasure!

I love making something fun and useful out of what other people might think of as trash.

FWIW, I have made the tater tire towers for many years and it's really been amazing how it increases yield up here in the north. The tires hold the heat overnight which the taters like.

Railroad ties, yes. They have creosote or other rot retardants. Tires have rubber, carbon black, sulfur, and whatever steel or fabric is used. Although they can smell bad, they aren't toxic. If you look in any tire shop, you'll find guys handling them all day long barehanded.

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George Washington did not run and hide.

Goat toys!

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I have been thinking for a year or two now that I could use a bunch of old tires stacked up and filled with dirt or sand to build a very serviceable and not too unattractive target shooting backstop.

Are they the steel belted kind? Those are much harder to cut and shape. Personally, I want one made into a parrot planter to hang from a tree.

Like these
http://www.ponyswings.com/tropical_bird_planters.htm

In farm show this month they had lots of ideas for old tires. Someone made a root cellar/storm shelter out of a dozen or so. Plus a field harrow. Lots of stuff. Like my signature says there is no such thing as waste, it's just a misplaced resource. Just gotta figure out what to do with the bounty you have discovered. I'm personally looking looking do a few big ones for making cattle feeders.

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I'm so done here.

You can take them to the tire store, they recycle them, I am sure they will charge you.

You can get some money from the rims if you scrap the metal.

Tire store told me to call the land fill. Land fill charges $1/ tire. I might do that with the ones that are torn up and deteriorated.

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Tiny Forest ~ my tiny blog

yes, i think most of the ones that show a lot of wear also show steel fibers. i am not very skillful with tool or artwork so the really neat things one does with a recycled tire aren't in my field of vision at all. was thinking more like the seats, dogbed, pond, gulley stoppers....

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Tiny Forest ~ my tiny blog

I've terraced my garden, made a foundation for the loafing sheds, made a wall with them.

Yes they play a role in rammed earth foundations too. You might need more than a dozen unless you are building on a slope...

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Progress always seems faster when things are going downhill.

I have about 40 of them on a steep bank beside my shop. I filled them with rotted horse manure and planted different flowers, some perennial and some annual. They look great after the flowers cover them in summer. Right now in mid winter they aren't to attractive cause they look like naked tires lying there. They look better each year though cause the guys that trim the trees along the road bring me free loads of chipped wood. I compost it and after about two years I fill around the tires with it.. What I don't use for mulch I add a little lime to it and it goes on the manure spreader out out to the pasture.

If the tire is worn but otherwise still in good shape - you can get them recapped - a lot of trucks use recapped tires -

Every so often my area has a free tire disposal . The state designates when & where you can drop off old tires . You might contact your department of highways & find out if they do anything like that in your area .

Pay the buck a tire and get them off the books.

I can tell you where "worn out used tires" around here go...

Most get disposed at the Tire shop, others get BURNED, some people half way bury them at the driveway and paint them white, and others wind up in the creek.