Tire dumping in Detroit, mountain of a mess

(WXYZ) - Everybody knows what the worst blight problem is in Detroit.  It's vacant buildings.  But you might be surprised what’s close behind:  tire dumping. 

When you get new tires on your car, the old ones are supposed to be hauled off to a shredding operation for recycling. They are shredded and the rubber is re-used for everything from playground mulch to floor mats.

But too often these used tires end up dumped in vacant lots and vacant buildings across the city. When this happens, somebody has to pay to clean up the mess, and more often than not it’s you and me.

There are relatively small piles all over the city of Detroit.

We discovered the mother of all tire piles on Lyndon Avenue in Northwest Detroit. More than 50 thousand tires were dumped on a piece of industrial property.

Who would ever do something like that?

A man named Henry Ross. He’s the CEO of a company called Beal’s Rubber Recycling. Our investigation reveals that the company did a lot of dumping and virtually no recycling.

As you’ll see in our investigation Wednesday night at 11 p.m., Henry Ross played the system and left a mountain of a mess.

You’ll also find out how he was able to pull this off when he was licensed by the state to haul scrap tires and why the state wasn’t able to stop him even when they discovered what was going on.

And you’ll see the sparks fly when we confront Ross with our camera rolling and ask him why he dumped all of those scrap tires.

That’s all Wednesday on 7 Action News at 11 p.m.