Retired man takes on nemesis, cleans up 15,000 discarded tires

Washington Post

5 days ago

Soaked in dark, stagnant water and sweat, Jon Merryman stood at the bottom of a Maryland ravine choked with poison ivy, trash and his arch nemesis: illegally discarded tires.
A horde of mosquitoes buzzed around his head, but just like the occasional rat, snake or hornet's nest he's uncovered over the years, he seemed unfazed by the bloodsuckers.
Only tires truly grate his soul.
'For some reason, they tick me off more than anything,' he said, wiping his brow and standing near Greenbelt Park in Prince George's County. 'I definitely hate tires.'
Merryman, 62, squatted down low and took a firm, two-handed grip beneath a massive tractor-trailer tire. With a grunt, he deadlifted the heavy rubber and flipped it up the slope. He did this over and over, tire by tire for days until he'd built an impressive staircase about 50 feet up to the guardrail along the shoulder of busy Kenilworth Avenue. Up and down the roadway, piles of trash and tires he wrestled up from the depths sat, waiting for highway cleanup crews to haul them away.
Merryman usually contacts the crews ahead of time to let them know he's cleaning up, and he said he's never had a problem.
Some people pay money to do this at a gym, but not at the swamps, ditches, dead ends and other illegal dumps where you'll find Merryman on any given day, in various corners of the country. The average automobile tire can weigh up to 25 pounds but truck tires can range anywhere from 35 to 100 pounds or more. He drinks a lot of water to combat leg cramps.
On a recent afternoon, the Baltimore County resident was not far from home, but he'd also recently visited Philadelphia to help hundreds of others clean up a mountain of tires dumped by a creek there. He always wears gloves, a fluorescent vest for visibility and insect repellent.
So far this year, Merryman has also wrangled tires in South Carolina and Florida and attended something called a 'tire party' in Atlanta. He has a goal of cleaning up trash in every county in America — there's more than 3,000 of them — often with his trusty orange bucket, trash tongs and his mascot, Sharkey D'Shark. The plastic, Great White shark was trash of course, but Merryman said it was 'too cool' to actually throw away so he uses it in his social media posts about garbage pick up.
Merryman said he will be in Alaska around Labor Day for vacation, but he's carved out some time to pick up trash in new counties there, too.
'I used to call him 'tire man,' but I also call him the 'trashiest man in the whole Patapsco valley',' said Betsy McMillion, the former environmental program director with the Patapsco Heritage Greenway, a nonprofit that protects what it calls Maryland's 'most dramatic river valley.'
Earlier this month, Merryman took a non-tire-related vacation to South Korea with his wife, Kirsten, and once he got to Jeju Island, he couldn't help himself.
'There's a lot of trash there," he said. 'I was picking up trash all over the place.'
This is what retirement looks like for Merryman. Fellow tire haters say the world should feel blessed that the former Lockheed Martin software designer didn't just take up golf or birding. He is one man against seemingly insurmountable odds, they said, and yet he soldiers on.
'He's the biggest trash champion that I know,' said Scott Zillmer, a map editor for National Geographic who has accompanied Merryman on dozens of cleanups.
Zillmer, 48, of Silver Spring, said he doesn't have as much time to dedicate to de-tiring the world as Merryman, but he explained that Merryman has almost a preternatural ability to find tire dumps.
'He's proof one man can make a heck of a difference,' Zillmer said. 'What he's unique at doing is finding sites where you can make a massive impact. He's so good at getting in the mind of a guy who is going to make an illegal dump. He knows what their motives are and what their needs are: a place to pull off the road, quickly, with a hill going down. He can read the landscape and pretty much know if there will be tires there.'
When asked how many tires he thinks he hauled away by himself, Merryman got to calculating. He said he averages about 900 to 1,000 tires a year, though he's on track to beat that average this year. Merryman isn't afraid to venture onto private land if it's clear someone dumped there, and said he's never had a problem with property owners once they learn about his hobby.
In 2013, Merryman, a father of two, pushed himself and totaled 2,247.
'Probably over 15,000 total, and that's a conservative estimate,' he said.
He rejects finger-pointing, arguing that littering is a collective problem requiring collective responsibility. His optimism rests on the simple math of removal: every bag collected means less pollution.
Tires pile up in mind-boggling numbers in the United States. The Federal Highway Administration estimates that 280 million tires are discarded by Americans yearly, and just 30 million of them are reused or retreaded. That leaves 250 million that need to be 'managed,' and the highway administration estimates that 2 to 3 billion have accumulated in legal stockpiles and illegal dumps over the years as a result.
Even legal stockpiles can turn disastrous. In 1983, an arsonist ignited millions of tires at a stockpile in Virginia, a toxic fire that burned for nearly nine months and turned the land into a Superfund site.
There's no perfect outcome for a tire's life, no real happy ending, Merryman said, and that's what irks him. If they're not recycled, they could seemingly last forever, but even the recycling process, he said, isn't ideal. So, they pile up, forgotten, for decades. He's found mature trees that have grown through tires.
In most states, tire dumping is a misdemeanor, punishable with a fine. Jail time is rare, if ever.
'That's if they're even caught or prosecuted,' Merryman said.
Merryman's quest began in 2008, he said, while on a lunch break at Lockheed Martin. He likes to get outside for lunch, so he walked along Deep Run, a creek behind his office in Hanover. Merryman had already started doing cleanups with the Patapsco Heritage Greenway, but this day, in particular, felt like an epiphany.
'I saw a washing machine, then I saw a motorcycle chassis, all kinds of stuff. It looked like people had been dumping there for decades,' he said. 'I thought, 'Someone has to clean this stuff up.'
The dump behind Merryman's office nagged him, and the second time he visited, he saw more trash but also spotted a bald eagle, his first ever in Maryland. He's not saying the bird spoke to him that day, but it felt like something did.
'That time I thought 'we'll I'll be the one to clean it up then' 'he recalled.
Merryman had the trash bug before that epiphany, McMillion said. She saw how a submerged shopping cart, mired in muck in Catonsville's Bull Run, became a white whale for him.
'I had college kids trying to get this thing out, and they couldn't do it,' she said. 'He spent a of of time on it. He was obsessed.'
Merryman defeated the shopping cart, of course, she said, explaining there was one year when Merryman was responsible for 60 percent of her organization's trash cleanup totals.
'He's literally a one-man show,' she said.
Merryman prefers to work alone or with Zillmer, rather than large group cleanups typically organized around Earth Day. Every day is Earth Day for him.
Along Kenilworth Road, Merryman eventually flipped every tire up the staircase, then he flipped those up too. The woods, at least for the moment, were mostly clean.
Someone, somewhere, was rolling tires down another ravine, though, and Merryman will find those too, clearing away the detritus of our disposable culture one piece of trash at a time.