Tire Recycling & Disposal in Ocoee, FL

Short version: no. Florida pulled whole tires out of its landfills years ago, so they can’t go in the household trash, and a hauler can’t drop them at a regular landfill unless they’ve already been cut down to size. The rule lives in Florida Statute 403.717: waste tires have to go to a permitted facility, and whoever hauls them has to be a registered collector with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection.

One number trips up a lot of Ocoee shops: 25. The moment someone moves more than 25 tires a month for you, you’re on the hook to keep records — date, count, the hauler’s registration number, the driver’s name. Miss that, and the fine follows you, not the truck.

That’s why we keep our WACS registration (#108814) current and hand you clean paperwork on every pickup. You stay on the right side of the law, the tires actually get recycled into tire-derived fuel and crumb rubber instead of sitting in a pile breeding mosquitoes, and nobody loses a Saturday to a code violation. Want to read it yourself? The Florida DEP waste-tire page spells out the whole thing.

✓ Reviewed by Rubén Feliz — owner & licensed operator, Feliz Family Recycling LLC (WACS #108814).

A tire doesn’t just vanish into a landfill — in Florida it legally can’t. Here’s the real path once it leaves your Ocoee lot or our drop-off.

We sort the load first and pull anything that’s still got life in it. The rest gets shredded. Most of it becomes tire-derived fuel (TDF) — a cleaner-burning fuel that cement kilns and paper mills run in place of coal. A good chunk gets ground into crumb rubber: the springy stuff under playgrounds, in running tracks and athletic turf, even blended into road asphalt. Bigger casings sometimes get a second life in civil-engineering jobs like erosion control.

The point is simple — a used tire is a raw material, not garbage. Nationally, about three-quarters of scrap tires get turned into something useful instead of dumped (U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association). Everything we collect goes that way. Never a landfill, never an illegal pile.

If you know Ocoee by Starke Lake and Bill Breeze Park, by the old Withers-Maguire House downtown, or by the Veterans Memorial Interchange where SR-429, Florida’s Turnpike and SR-50 stack up, you’ll find our drop-off is an easy run from any of them. We’re at 339 W Main St, Suite 105, in downtown Apopka — about 11 miles north of Ocoee, roughly a 20-minute drive.

Pick the route that fits where you’re starting:

• From downtown Ocoee / Starke Lake — Clarke Rd north to Clarcona-Ocoee Rd, then SR-429 (Western Beltway) north to the Apopka exits and US-441 into downtown.
• From the Silver Star Rd (SR-438) corridor — west to SR-429 (Exit 24), north to Apopka, then US-441.
• From the SR-50 / West Colonial side — the Western Beltway straight up to the Apopka 414/441 exits.
• Along the West Orange Trail? — the same Clarcona-Ocoee Rd that the trail follows leads you north toward our end of town.

Get turn-by-turn directions on Google →