It took little time but left a big mess.

Early one morning last month, under the cover of darkness, someone pulled up to Stoneridge Apartments and dumped 80 scrap tires in a back parking lot, near a cluster of pine trees.

"Who would do something so rude?" asked Marcia Moody, who manages Stoneridge, one of three West St. Paul apartment complexes to see illegal tire dumps in recent weeks.

Police investigators across the metro area are wondering the same thing.

Over the past month, similar reports -- some involving more than 100 tires -- have popped up in Inver Grove Heights in the south metro and New Brighton and St. Anthony in the north, West St. Paul police Lt. Brian Sturgeon said.

"They pull up wherever it's convenient," he said, "stop, dump and go."

Outstate Minnesota has also seen an increase in tire dumps in recent years, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, which regulates the accumulation, transport and disposal of waste tires in the state.

Since paying to recycle the tires can cost $5 or more a piece, depending on size, the sight of a pile of discarded tires can be, well, deflating for property owners who are left to take care of the mess.

The metro area tire-dump cases stand out because of their size and sites, Sturgeon said. Typically, abandoned industrial areas or vacant lots are the prime targets.

"We'll get a few reports of one or two of them being left by the side of the road but not the 20 to 50 at a time like we have now," Sturgeon said.

At Pearlwood Estates in Inver Grove Heights, the perpetrators dumped more than 100 tires in broad daylight.

"We think it was between 8 and 9 in the morning," said Brandi Rienecker, the complex's assistant manager. "I honestly don't know how they did it without anyone seeing them."

Two neighboring properties were also picked as tire-dumping sites around the same time, Rienecker said.

Metro-area investigators have vague witness accounts to work with, Sturgeon said. In a few cases, a vehicle towing a U-Haul trailer was seen around the time of the tire dumps.

"Whether (the dumps) are related or a coincidence, we don't know," Sturgeon said. "But there are a lot of similarities with us and Inver Grove and the suburbs up north."

Because tires are banned from landfills, consumers and businesses have to pay a fee for them to be recycled.

So one theory among investigators is that a smaller auto-type business is paying someone to dispose of the tires on the cheap, instead of going through a reputable recycler.

"There are a million theories as to why someone came into possession with that many tires," Inver Grove Heights police Lt. Sean Folmar said. "Maybe a recycler raised their rates, or someone just inherited an old building with tons of tires."

Heidi Kroening, the MPCA's solid-waste compliance and enforcement supervisor, said the agency hears about only outstate tire dumps because metro-area counties have their own solid-waste departments.

"We're seeing tire dumps become an issue, along with electronics," she said. "And once you get into greater Minnesota, we can get complaints anywhere from a few hundred tires to where you're talking thousands of tires."

Kroening blames the rise in tire-dump complaints to the recession and a small number of tire recyclers throughout the state.

"We're now down to three facilities that recycle tires," she said.

As a way to push more recycling, the MPCA is working with the tire industry to find new ways that shredded tires can be reused, Kroening said.

"It all comes down to demand and market," she said. "We're hoping that if we can generate a bigger market for tires to be used, there will be more of a demand -- and that would drive more recycling."
