The Osborne Reef in Florida was made of discarded tyres and was supposed to solve two problems: reducing waste to landfill and creating habitats. It did neither.
From Egypt’s SS Thistlegorm and Australia’s SS Yongala to Florida’s Great Carrier Reef, there are thousands of artificial reefs benefiting marine animals around the world.
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But just putting something in the ocean doesn’t mean it will help. Poorly planned artificial reefs can go horribly wrong.
That’s exactly what happened in the 1970s when up to two million tyres were plonked into the ocean off the coast of Broward County, Florida, with the aim of creating a new habitat for marine life.
The idea behind Osborne Reef – or Tyre Reef – was well-intentioned. A company called Broward Artificial Reef, Inc. suggested that putting discarded tyres into the ocean could save them from landfill while also creating habitat that would boost fisheries.
Sadly, the theory didn’t hold up. “At the time there was no knowledge that tires were an ineffective material for reef building,” says Broward County on its website.
We now know – far too late – that the creation of the so-called reef would end up as a catastrophe.
The tyres were put into the sea in bundles, held together with plastic straps and metal fastenings. “The reef was built from the wreckage of a 60-foot barge, tyres bound by steel clips and nylon ropes, and concrete ero-jacks,” writes Stephanie Crawford in a University of Miami report.
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But the bundles didn’t hold together. According to a Florida Department of Environmental Protection report in 2023, “many of the strappings broke during the clamshell deployment, and the remaining straps became loose due to the corrosion of the metal binding clips.”
Without anything to hold them together, the tyres broke loose and were moved around by currents and waves, damaging natural reefs in the area. Some even washed ashore.
But undoing the harm was much more difficult. More than a million tyres were scattered across 36-acres of ocean and many of them had become buried in the sand. Removing them safely would be so difficult and expensive that the daunting task seemed almost impossible.
Many years later, cleanup projects did take place, starting in 2001. This effort raised just 1,600 tyres from the failed reef.
A three-year attempt that started in 2007 managed to remove more than 70,000 tyres. “Each two-man team of United States Army and Navy divers strung tires onto wire ropes which was then buoyed to the surface using two-ton lift bags,” explains Broward County. The tyres were towed to a ship and hauled up by crane into trailers to be taken away for recycling.
But do the maths and you’ll quickly realise that 70,000 tyres is a drop in the ocean when there were up to two million down there.
Another cleanup began in 2015, taking up to 550 tyres out of the water each day. According to Broward County, this programme lasted for several years and had removed around 275,000 tyres by the end of 2018. In 2026, around half a million tyres had been removed and efforts are ongoing to clean up more.
Experts are also trying to relocate corals that had started growing on the tyres so the tyres can be removed.
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