The tires are real. The paperwork is the part that goes missing.
Every figure below carries a source name, a year and an outbound link. Where no published number exists — including any statewide total for uncollected waste tire fees — we say so rather than estimate.
Recycling improved dramatically. Generation never stopped.
Tires remaining in stockpiles as of 2023 — down from more than 1 billion in 1990, a reduction of over 95%.
Source: USTMA, 2023 ↗Markets lag generation
USTMA's own framing is that end-use markets have not kept pace with the volume of tires reaching end of life. When demand for crumb rubber, tire-derived fuel and civil engineering material softens, tires that were paid for still have to go somewhere — and the cheapest destination is a pile.
Source: USTMA, 2023 ↗Why a pile is not just untidy
Whole tires hold water and breed mosquitoes, which in Louisiana means vector-borne disease risk. Once a pile ignites, it burns for weeks: tire fires are difficult to extinguish, produce heavy smoke and oily runoff, and are routinely handled by evacuation rather than suppression.
What happens when nobody has to prove where the tire went
Tires counted in unsanctioned dumps in New Orleans East — tires that were paid for under the program and never reached a processor.
Source: The Advocate, October 2022 ↗How long roughly 100,000 waste tires burned in central Louisiana, forcing the evacuation of a nearby prison.
Source: The Advocate, October 2022 ↗How long buried shredded tire in Scott smoldered underground, venting gas near a neighborhood.
Source: The Advocate, October 2022 ↗Three incidents, one missing record
A dump in New Orleans East, a fire in central Louisiana that burned for eleven days and forced a prison evacuation, and shredded tire buried in Scott that smoldered for more than four years next to homes. In each case the fee was collected at a register somewhere. In none of them was there a custody record that would have shown the tires never reached a processor.
Source: The Advocate, October 2022 ↗There is no published figure for the dollar value of uncollected Louisiana waste tire fees, so we do not quote one. The point of Maverick is that such a figure becomes computable from primary records rather than estimated from assumptions.