Tired Tires: When the Rubber Leaves the Road
GRIFFIN: A look at the CNN Center in Atlanta. Come visit us. We'll take you on a tour. Checking our top stories. This just in at the nuclear summit in Washington. The U.S. and Russia today signed an agreement to eliminate weapons-grade plutonium from their military programs. The measure, an update to an accord they signed in 2000. The summit concludes later today. Another developing story, an Israeli counterterrorism unit is warning of a possible militant attack. The warning is directed to Israelis who are in Egypt's Sinai peninsula, urging them to return home because they face an imminent risk of terrorist abduction. I don't know if you know this, but Sinai is a very popular tourist destination there for both Israelis and Arab tourists, so the Israelis are being told to leave. In West Virginia, the last of the bodies of 29 men killed in a coal mine explosion have now been recovered. A state mine official says they were removed from deep inside the sprawling Upper Big Branch mine earlier today. Federal and state investigators in West Virginia now plan to determine what exactly caused the explosion. There are more than 80 percent of Americans living in suburban or urban areas, and that means millions and millions of commuters using gasoline and countless tires. Well, in today's "Green Solutions In Focus," CNN photojournalist Eddie Cortes shows us one Atlanta company turning old tires down a new road, away from the landfill.</s>DEWEY S. GRANTHAM, JR., LIBERTY TIRE RECYCLING: What we do here is we recycle tires. Nothing more, nothing less. A tire never decomposes. If a tire goes into a landfill, it's there forever. We're offering an alternative solution to that problem. As a result of us recycling tires, we're able to keep these tires out of landfills and make them into products that are resold on to the market. This particular piece of rubber, just a few minutes ago, was a whole tire. I'm Dewey Grantham with Liberty Tire Recycling. We've basically got three products here. The rubber mulch ends up in bags, and you can buy it on the shelf in a variety of colors. And the benefit of using rubber mulch is, basically, it lasts forever. This is actually the steel belting that was used inside of a tire. That material ends up at a steel mill, who melts it down and reused into metal. The two-inch TDF product that we make, that's an alternative fuel. It ends up primarily at paper mills, which they'll burn to create energy to run their process. So what we have here are tires that are good, reusable tires. A lot of these tires are situations where a customer at a retail tire store may have had one bad tire, but instead of just replacing one, they replaced two. The other one was still good. We'll sort these tires out and not process them, and sell them back into the used tire market. We're keeping tires out of landfill. We're making them into reusable products. At the end of the day we've done a good deed.</s>GRIFFIN: And on Earth Day, CNN photojournalists on the award- winning "In Focus" team will look at the people behind this global environmental movement and the impact they've made on their neighborhoods and beyond. "Green Solutions In Focus," Saturday, April 24th, 3:00 p.m. Eastern, only right here on CNN. Well, 70 earthquakes in southern California and northern Mexico If it seems high, it is. Chad Myers is going to tell you why after this break.