Used tires are an environmental disaster. Because by design a tire is not designed to decompose and the world is only producing more of it everyday. A tire has a chemical concoction of various chemicals including heavy metals. Can you get money for scrap tires? So just throwing them in a landfill would take up space and the chemicals can leech into ground water and pollute it. Also, one of the reasons it is very hard to recycle a tire is because of its composite construction. There are steel, nylon, kevlar reinforcement inside tires for structural strength. In third world places, people burn tires and recover the metal reinforcement for money polluting the air. However, there are a few things that are being done to manage the problem of used tires.