Bicycle Fixation Weblog
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07/20/2010: "Recycle Your Blown Tubes for $$ in LA This Weekend"
Performance Bike shops have lately gotten into the habit of celebrating their new store openings by giving folks a little store credit for each blown bicycle innertube that's brought in for recycling. This weekend, they're doing it in Los Angeles, opening a new store in Woodland Hills, and re-opening a refurbished one in Santa Monica. From their press release:This weekend, from July 23rd to July 25th, Performance will celebrate the grand openings of its new Woodland Hills and completely remodeled Santa Monica stores with the Bike Tube Blow-Out, a recycling program sponsored by Performance and Liberty Tire, the largest scrap tire recycler in the country. During the weekend, anyone can bring their used or blown-out inner tubes to the store and receive up to three $5 money cards for the tubes they recycle.I find it a little puzzling, as most blown tubes can be patched and re-used, which is considerably better than putting more energy into recycling them. But since in real life folks do throw away so many tubes, it's still worth bringing them in.
Liberty Tire Recycling, the nation's largest collector of used and scrap tires, will turn the bike tubes into mulch for playgrounds, athletic fields, railroad ties and highway asphalt, among other uses. The company collects and recycles nearly one-third of all of America's annual scrap tire material and has cleaned up more than 150 dump sites littered with nearly 40 million scrap tires�"more than any other organization.
"We estimate that a major city can annually generate several tons of used rubber just from blown out bicycle inner tubes alone," said Jim Thompson, CEO of Performance Inc. "Our aim is to make bike inner tubes a proven reusable resource for playgrounds, manufacturing and other applications."
Performance's Woodland Hills store is an entirely new location. It's located at 6400 Owensmouth Avenue. The Santa Monica store, one of the most popular Performance stores in the country, is located at 501 Broadway, at the intersection of 5th Street and Broadway.
But it would be much better if they'd accept worn-out tires for recycling as well,; those can't be revived with something as simple as patching, and contain a lot more rubber anyway.
Ya might suggest that to them if you drop by....
