In article , Janet Baraclough
wrote:

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from (paghat) contains these words:


Today I heard from activist Pauline Noble in Shropshire England:

"Whole tires were banned from landfill in the UK in 2003 and rubber crumb
is due to follow suit in July 2006. The Government / tire*industry here is
frantic.* They are selling this minced up cr*p to anyone that will buy
it, who in turn then*sell it on to the poor unsuspecting public whilst the
cadmium, copper and sulphates run off*happily down their drains.

With bans on this harmful toxic product already coming in Britain,

Good on for the UK in preparing to ban this stuff in 2006. The
toxic-waste-for-your-gardens industry is busy right now trying to stop the
ban from going into effect.

That completely misrepresents the UK situation, and btw, there is no
rubber-waste-for-your-garden industry here.

That's YOU misrepresenting. The majority of crumb rubber is used in the UK
as artificial filldirt -- including in park areas, new development &
construction areas, many of these places being intended for future gardens
as well as future buildings, but which are now known to be irreversibly
damaged. A lot of this use will be banned as of 2006, but with enough
loopholes in the new regs that it will probably continue to be misused for
some while unless watchdogs document continued harmful use, & get the regs
tightened over time.

Until then, there are no restrictions at all in the UK to continue using
granulated rubber as fill dirt, including as part of gardening landscapes.
The artificial filldirt is sometimes a combination of silica sand &
granulated rubber, but increasingly it has been 100% granulated rubber.
UK companies misrepresent this artificial filldirt as a suitable medium
for lawn turf.

You may call that "not for gardens" but you're splitting hairs. Lawn,
garden, soccer field, riding trails -- it's a hell of lot of toxic waste
dumped intentionally for profits & misrepresented as a healthy thing to be
doing.

Vast amounts of rubber & plastic waste product mixtures have been dumped
in British parks, thick upon riding trails, misreperesented as "all
season" riding surface allegedly "superior to" wood shavings for all the
same lying reasons pioneered by American politicians & business
scoundrals. This toxic matter migrates throughout the parks & kills
plants, & leaches zinc & other heavy metals into water, until the UK EPA
finally admitted it was causing overt damage to the environment.

It is also being widely used in playgrounds. The first major inroads for
spreading this toxic waste all over tarnation was the recommendation to
put it under children's feet in America too.

It has been sold to UK farmrs by the millions of tons to coat training
corals. Masses of mixed plastic & rubber particles not rotting away as do
woodchips. The growing farm use of crumb rubber caused toxic run-off that
damaged forage in pastures.

Wherever woodchips are used, this criminally minded industry in the UK has
tried to horn in with their blend of rubber mulch & PVC particles.

Tyre Shredders in Surrey is active in attempting to stop the coming ban,
financing an international organization wonderfully called CRUMB (Crumb
Rubber Universal Marketing Bureau), only an acronym like EVIL or
HERETO****YOUBAD could've been more apropos!.

From 2006,shredded tyres will be banne d **only from landfill** in the
UK. That just means, that after that date shredded tyres can't be
disposed of in landfill/dumps (whole tyres are already banned from being
buried in landfill/dumps). This is an EU directive.

In the UK, govt policy is that used whole and shredded tyres will be
recycled; material made from recycled tyres is NOT banned.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/...pics/tyres.htm

What the hell does material manufactured from recycled material have to do
with anything? Damn straight, if it's made into welcome mats & carpet
pads, great. No one ever said rubber shouldn't be recycled into actual
physical products. It's polluting the landscape with it that is the
problem, & in the UK that's become a very big problem.

To get the ban through concessions were made. In fact, the tire industry
helped write the new restrictions so there would be plenty of loopholes.
One loophole is that artificial filldirt can still be used under buildings
for new construction. Obviously there will be no one monitoring this & yes
it will still end up in the landscape proper, where it will continue to
kill gardens & the environment generally. The INTENT though is t o stop
the widespread use of artificial filldirt in the environment generally,
gardened or not -- in the hope tha it will be recycled as a percentage of
concrete instead, or new methods will be developed so that finally rubber
can be recycled as rubber (as now formulated, old tires cannot be used to
make new ones). By letting the tire industry shape the regulations,
however, there is no certainty much good will actually come of it. Baby
steps though, & the industry IS scared.

The Government / tire*industry here is
frantic.* They are selling this minced up cr*p to anyone that will buy
it, who in turn then*sell it on to the poor unsuspecting public whilst the
cadmium, copper and sulphates run off*happily down their drains.

I have no idea what PN is talking about here. I have never seen, or
heard of, minced or crumb rubber being advertised or sold to the
gardening public in the UK, or used for any kind of garden mulch or soil
amendment; so it's hard to imagine for what other outdoor purpose she
claims it's being sold to the public,(how else could run-off from it be
getting down their drains?)

Pauline's been an activist on this for four years, but if you read better,
she never once used the word "garden." I qoted only one of her paragraphs;
in the entirety it might've been more clear to you she is addressing the
widespread use of crumb rubber in parks on horse trails, & on playgrounds.
These scatter physically plus put leechates into forests & gardens &
waterways.

Janet.

In the UK, minced rubber has never been sold as a garden mulch

So you said. Never mind taht you're wrong -- crumnb rubber is used in
England under the disguising term "bulking agent" as a truly second-rate
carbon source. "Bulking agent" can be straw, sawdust, woodchips, rubber
chips, crumb rubber, or even plastic particles; if the product does not
guarantee itself organic, veryr likely the bulking agent is pulverized
rubber, introducing excesses of zinc into the garden.

But that was not the subject & not what is thus far part of the pending
ban. I mention it because it just shows how wrong you are. It's what
happens when you care insufficiently -- you're easily tricked into doing
harm to the environment even if you thought you were doing pretty well.

The real issue is it is used in England as a substitute for fill dirt in
vast expanses of landscape that will afterward be put to any number of
uses (including areas to be planted), & on park trails & bridal trails &
on playgrounds & on farms in corrals. That it is not sold in garden shops
as a pure crumb rubber recommended as a SURFACE mulch is hardly an
improved situation; when it is deeply packed in as fill dirt & cannot even
be scraped off for future gardening!

You may play with the truth here by relying on the idea that you can't buy
it in the garden center in tiny bags labeled "mulch," but since it is used
in the UK by the millions of tons as a replacement for filldirt in many
types of UK landscapes, really that's AT LEAST as bad as making the
individual gardeners do it a little bit at a time. That it's "secretly" in
commercial composts as "bulking agent" makes even your limited sense of
"no it's not sold here like that" rather less than factual, because, well,
yes it is.

And the harmfulness of this junk has been worse in the UK than in the US
because in the UK these monsters have combined multiple waste disposal
problems & permitted powdered plastics to be mixed into the artificial
fill dirt -- all stuff that will practically never degrade.

-paggers

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com