When you get new tires on your car, you’re charged a fee to “properly dispose” of
the old tires. Too often, that does not happen. The tires end up being abandoned
in vacant lots or thrown into a remote ditch. Zak Rosen reports one group is
picking up those tires, making something useful and helping people:
Transcript
When you get new tires on your car, you’re charged a fee to “properly dispose” of
the old tires. Too often, that does not happen. The tires end up being abandoned
in vacant lots or thrown into a remote ditch. Zak Rosen reports one group is
picking up those tires, making something useful and helping people:
Mike Mason: “If you notice, it don’t take much to find tires around here, you don’t have
to go far.”
Mike Mason is driving me around in a big white truck, looking for thrown out
tires. And we’ve found some. A pretty big pile of old tires:
“You see how they dump them around abandoned buildings?”
Rosen: “Who do you think dumped these?”
Mason: “Somebody went somewhere and picked up some tires from a tire shop,
and they paid them to get rid of them, and instead of taking them somewhere,
they’ll dump them right here.”
Abandoned tires are a problem in a lot of big cities and that’s the case here on the west side of Detroit. The tire piles are a
fire hazard. They’re breeding grounds for mosquitoes. They’re an
environmental disaster.
Mason loads a dozen or so tires into the back of the truck. He’s taking them
to a factory where workers take these problem tires and turn them into
something useful.
(Sound of engine)
One large room of this multi-purpose factory is used to shred the formerly
discarded tires into think rubber strips. The strips are then hole punched,
fixed together with 3 metal rods and designed with colorful plastic
beads. The end result is a custom-made doormat made out of
recycled tires.
This whole venture started when Reverend Faith Fowler came across a
magazine article about a Native American tribe making doormats out of old
car tires in Oklahoma. She thought, heck, we should be doing this in Detroit:
“It intrigued me because of the vacant lots here in the city, and the fact that we’re dealing with illegal
dumping. We knew we had a bunch of men and woman who have
been homeless and are having a hard time finding work right now.”
Reverend Fowler is the executive director of Cass Community Social Services. That’s a center for homeless
people and people with addictions. And now, she’s heading up the new
doormat-making business.
The people who work here actually live across
the street or at another one of Cass’s housing programs
around the city. Fowler says she’s really into this new business model because
of all the problems it fights, unemployment, vacant lots, and illegal
dumping:
“We set it up as a training program so that for three months they work just four
hours a day just learning, sort of the business if you will, and at the end of the
training time they can either decide they want to work here or they can take a
reference from us to work somewhere else.”
This really is a small-scale operation. There are four part time and three full-time employees here, making about
25 mats a day:
“I don’t know if that sounds like a lot or a little!”
That’s Stacey Leigh. She’s in charge of supervising the door mat operation. She says the whole point of this business is to work in a place that’s not very high stress. They don’t have quotas and all the employees get paid the same thing no matter how many mats they make in a day.
“It’s not all about production and bottom line. For us, the
bottom line is human beings, so that’s where our focus is.”
And some of the people making the doormats say the approach makes the
difference for them. Before starting work
at Cass Community Social Services recently, Davel Davis was having a really hard
time finding a job:
“I would have jumped on any job that was offered to me but it’s just my mental
state, when I do work, I let that bother me and I feel odd. But it’s all part of the
illness, schizophrenia. And basically when this came along, I was very happy, knowing that I
could work and not have any distractions to where it would make me not want to work, so I like
it here.”
Now, no one is making a lot of money by any means. But Reverend Faith
Fowler says it’s making a difference for the people, and for the environment.
More than 1,000 mats will have been made. That means more than 2,000
discarded tires that were illegally dumped are now welcoming people into homes.
For the Environment Report, I’m Zak Rosen.