Starr Tire Pile cleanup continues.

Recycling Environmental Group and Carbon Services Corp. have received $1.3 million in grants from Pennsylvania to fund cleanup projects at the Starr Tire Pile, the state's largest tire disposal pile, and to create markets for the 6 million-plus tires at the site in Greenwood Township, Columbia County.

Cleanup of the Starr Tire Pile began last year, when the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) began forcing companies and individuals who dumped tires at the site to begin removing them. The General Assembly appropriated $68 million in the 2004-05 budget to the DEP for the cleanup of scrap tires, including $2 million secured by the local state senator and representative specifically for work at the Starr Tire Pile. According to a release from the DEP, that funding is essential to its aggressive effort to clean up the site and to make responsible generators remove their tires, including the creation of the Starr Waste Tire Reuse Grant Program. The first two grants under this program have been awarded to Recycling Environmental Group and Carbon Services Corp.

The Recycling Environmental Group from Bloomsburg has received a $1 million grant for a 12-month project that will process about 1 million tires into 2- to 4-inch shreds.

Carbon Services Corp. of Lehighton received $300,000 to remove about 2,000 large, hard-to-dispose-of tires from the site. The tires, which are not suitable for conventional processing because each one can weigh more than half a ton, will be prepped in Philadelphia and deployed as a new reef habitat in the Atlantic Ocean.

Both projects are expected to create a combined 15 full-time jobs and generate economic development within Pennsylvania.