Underneath a fairly normal highway on-ramp in Broome County lies one of the most interesting engineering feats in the transportation history of the state of New York: three meters of shredded rubber, consisting of about a quarter million used car tires, laid down in the ground and covered over in 1999. It is a portion of Exit 4 on Route 17, constructed as part of a $30 million, six-mile road reconstruction project that stretched from Five Mile Point to Occanum.
According to a technical paper titled “Tire Shred Embankments: Design And Construction Considerations Verification Through Monitoring,” published by the International Geosynthetics Society, engineers filled a 200-meter-long section of embankment with about 2,500 metric tons of tire shreds, and instrumented the area to determine if it was possible to use scrap tires as a valid highway construction material instead of landfill waste. It was basically testing an idea that seemed too neat to be true: that America's problem with disposal of tires and its need to construct roads are two things that could be solved simultaneously. That pitch turned out to be more challenging and educational.
