THOUSAND OAKS, CALIF.—A mayor's advisory group wants Thousand Oaks to bring a crumb rubber grinder to Ventura County, Calif., to help deal with the 500,000 scrap tires disposed of there each year. In 1991, Thousand Oaks became the first city in the nation with a large-scale RAC (rubberized asphaltic concrete) street paving program when it awarded a $3 million contract to resurface streets with the material, said Grahame Watts, city management analyst.
As a result, the Mayor's Business Roundtable has urged the city to join with other cities and Ventura County to attract a plant so all the tires discarded in the county can stay there as part of the roads.
The city earlier applied unsuccessfully for a grant from the California Integrated Waste Management Board to fund a joint project with neighboring Camarillo, Calif., to make their own crumb rubber.
The waste board has not made a grant for such a plant from its market development fund for several years, said Byron Fitzgerald, chief of the CIWMB's special waste division.
``That market's been developed. There are companies making money selling crumb rubber all over the place,'' Mr. Fitzgerald said.
It may pay off for the county to have its own crumb rubber plant, CIWMB engineer Nate Gauff said.
A typical 1.5 percent rubber road application uses 3,516 tires per lane mile when the lanes are 12-feet wide and the application is 3-inches thick, Mr. Gauff said.