In 1972, a group of Florida fishermen had what seemed like a clever idea: dump old tires into the ocean and let a new reef grow around them. More than 50 years later, most of those tires are still down there, and they’ve done more harm than good.
The project was organized by Broward Artificial Reef Inc., a nonprofit group of fishermen and boaters, according to a Broward County government media kit on the cleanup effort. The plan was to bundle old tires together with steel clips and nylon rope, then sink them off Fort Lauderdale to create habitat for fish and coral, all while giving old tires a second life instead of piling up in landfills.
Roughly 2 million tires went into the water, spread across about 34 acres of ocean floor a little over a mile offshore, in waters 60 to 70 feet deep.
It didn’t work. Saltwater corroded the steel clips holding the tire bundles together, and the nylon rope gave out, too. Once the bundles broke apart, ocean currents and storms scattered loose tires across the seafloor, where they scraped against and damaged the natural reefs nearby instead of growing new ones. Some tires reportedly drifted as far away as North Carolina.
Cleanup efforts didn’t start in earnest until decades later. Between 2001 and 2009, military divers and other removal efforts pulled roughly 72,000 tires out of the water, according to a 2023 Florida House staff analysis of a bill addressing the reef. That left the vast majority of the original 2 million still scattered across the ocean floor.
Removal picked up again years later. A commercial contractor removed about 250,000 more tires between 2016 and 2019, at a cost of roughly $4.3 million, per that same House analysis. Even so, a November 2019 report found that somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million tires still needed to come out. The same analysis notes that early cost estimates ran around $17 per tire, which is part of why full removal has been called cost prohibitive.
State officials have kept pushing for a fix. “Those reefs are critical, certainly,” Florida state Sen. Bryan Ávila said, according to Florida Politics. “When you have a storm come, those reefs provide a barrier for the municipalities and the residents in that area.” State Rep. Anna Eskamani, meanwhile, framed the situation as a lesson learned, saying it’s better to “reduce waste, versus trying to recycle in ways that are not sustainable.”
Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection has since put state funding toward the cleanup and has been working with the Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Broward County to keep pulling tires out. A 2023 state law now requires the department to report on how many tires remain and to develop a plan for actually restoring the reef once removal wraps up.
Half a century after the original dumping, in other words, the mess it created is still being cleaned up. If you’re curious how to keep old materials out of the ocean in the first place, there’s a running list of ways to recycle just about anything that you may want to check out.
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