Using civil penalties, court orders and criminal prosecution, the state has reduced the number of abandoned tires in the past eight years from 36 million to 10.3 million.

And a perfect example of how this happened involves a Butler County man whose recycling dream neglected one steel-belted necessity: One must have state permits to haul, store and recycle tires.

Charles Tanner, 71, of Butler, said he still owns and uses a machine that compresses 100 tires into a one-ton bale 3 feet wide and 8 feet long. The bales can be used as foundation block and mobile home pads.

Until he lost it last year, Mr. Tanner held a state permit to haul tires from tire companies and auto wreckage yards to legal dump sites.

But Mr. Tanner said he had a better idea.

He took 10,000 waste tires to private properties in Plain Grove, Lawrence County, and nearby Summit Township, Butler County, where he compressed them into construction bales. He had no permit to conduct such activities.

So DEP officials ordered him in 2005 to haul the tires to a legal disposal site or face civil action. His lack of compliance prompted civil action against him.

When he still failed to comply, the state attorney general's office charged Mr. Tanner in June with two counts each of illegal hauling, storing and disposing of solid waste -- in this case, tires. Each third-degree misdemeanor count carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a $25,000 fine.

Mr. Tanner pleaded guilty Sept. 19 to two counts of illegal dumping and one count of operating an illegal storage facility. He was sentenced Nov. 8 to one year of probation and fined $3,000.

But even after his conviction, he still failed to dispose of the tire bales, despite a standing court order to do so. In October, Butler County Court fined him $500 for contempt of court.

"It was a matter of where the money would come from" to haul the tire-bales to a legal dump site, Mr. Tanner said.

Under state pressure, he hauled the 100 tire-bales, each containing 100 tires, to a legal disposal site in Weston, W.Va. Disposal and hauling costs amounted to $12,000, not including his cost of assembling the bales and loading them onto trucks.

But the state still wasn't through with Mr. Tanner.

Last week, the DEP assessed a civil penalty of $31,000 against him.

Mr. Tanner said he had trouble paying the $500 contempt-of-court fine and must pay $300 a month for the next nine months to satisfy the $3,000 criminal fine plus $300 in court costs and interest.

The $31,000 penalty came as "quite a surprise," he said, six hours after learning about it. "I thought this was settled and was behind me."

Despite fines, penalties and disposal costs of $47,000, Mr. Tanner said he still hasn't given up his dream of operating a profitable tire-bale business. In fact, he continues baling tires for a junk yard as a means of making them easier to haul to dump sites.

"Anybody in a sound mind would probably quit, but I think there's a sense of invention and sense of demonstration to officials and the state that this is a viable use of scrap tires as blocks," he said.

He said he will appeal the $31,000 fine.

"With all the bills I have, which includes the equipment we bought over the years, bankruptcy is not an option, but you'll have to discuss that with an attorney."

Freda Tarbell, spokeswoman for DEP's Northwest Regional Office in Meadville, Crawford County, said Mr. Tanner's desire to recycle tires "is no excuse for ignoring the law that protects the environment and public health."

For now, the major statewide problem with tires is sites where they've been dumped for decades, before laws were in place. These dumps stand as environmental threats because they provide havens for mosquitoes with West Nile virus and for vermin. They are also fire hazards.

Almost half the remaining waste tires statewide exist at the Starr pile in rural Columbiana County. The DEP has taken control of the 12-acre site which includes 5 million tires and is trying to dispose of them as efficiently as possible.

The 12.5 million waste tires produced each year statewide go to legal tire recyclers, Ms. Tarbell said. Haulers are paid fees to take them to recycling centers, which receive fees to accept them, then recycle them.

Existing dump sites, like the Starr pile, offer tires for free, but that's not economical for recyclers. They would have to load them, haul them great distances and clean them, without receiving any fees.

"Hauling whole tires is like hauling doughnuts," said David Althoff Jr., chief of DEP's Division of Energy Policy and Technology Deployment, and the person working on a strategy to rid tires from the Starr pile. "They are bulky with a lot of air."

Recyclers process waste tires in a variety of useful ways. They grind them into carbon-based powder, shred them into chips for use as a base for roads or athletic fields and recover rubber for use in other rubber-based products. Shredded tires can be burned as fuel in power plants. Bales, as Mr. Tanner realized, are being used in construction.

"There are promising new technologies, but they need to be demonstrated at a pilot scale," Mr. Althoff said. "We want to do things that work now, but with an eye toward what's coming next. As the cost of oil goes up, there's inherent energy in tires.

"We're looking for proposals to get something going" at the Starr pile, he said, noting the state already has removed 1 million tires from the pile.

While the state continues its action to rid the countryside of waste tires, other officials are trying to expand their arsenal against violators.

State attorney general spokesman Nils Frederiksen said his office is lobbying the state Legislature for harsher sentences and fines, with hope of a tiered system of penalties that better reflect the level of crime committed.

He said third-degree misdemeanor charges are an insufficient penalty against someone who dumps tractor-trailer loads of tires or waste in the state. It was that situation, he said, that prompted his office to file multiple charges against Mr. Tanner.

"We feel that 10,000 tires on someone else's property is illegal disposal," he said. "It's entirely feasible to operate a business like the one he describes, but if you are involved in a business like that, you have to go through proper authorization.

"You need permits."