Selfsufficientish.com

I have been making planters out of old wheels and tyres the last couple of days following a tutorial I found online but upon following a few links out of curiosity I found out that rubber can leach Cadmium.

Beware Cadmium Poisoning
Just a caution about growing food in tyres. Tyres contain cadmium which fixes the colour in rubber. Cadmium, though little talked about, is one of the more poisonous of the metals in our environment. Potatoes are known to accumulate cadmium, as do cabbages, carrots, radishes, lettuce, turnips, tobacco, cocoa and peanuts. Obviously potatoes are a concern because they form a large part of most people's diet. As is the case with all heavy metal poisoning, the early symptoms are not noticed until it is too late.

So now I'm worried... would paint stop it leaching or would using something like Pond liner with some holes in the bottom be better? Would a black bin liner suffice?

I did read the bit about old tyres being oxidized but better safe than sorry is my motto...

Has anyone else made these type of planters?

Info came from: http://www.thriftyfun.com/tf284146.tip.html
Tutorial is: http://www.wuvie.net/tireplanter.htm

*worried*

Hi SPS ... Some people make it their sole aim in life to frighten the pants off other people. Yes, there's cadmium in tyres. There's also cadmium on a lot of screws and bolts used to hold together pans, ovens, washing machines etc. etc. There's arsenic in light-emitting diodes. There's sodium and chlorine in table salt. Most parts of the potato plant contain solanin - an extremely effective alkaloid poison. Nettles contain loads of nasty substances. Apple pips contain strychnine.

The rubber used in tyres contains piles of substances which, in large enough doses and assuming that they managed to free themselves from the chemical bonds in which they're held, would quite effectively make a mess of you. But the amounts are usually piddling and they are in stable compounds anyway.

People have been using tyres as planters for decades, and there has been not a single case of anyone reporting harmful effects. The potato tubers do NOT pick up the cadmium from the rubber, just as they do not pick up the solanin from the rest of the plant (unless you expose them to light and they go green - that's solanin, and that's why you shouldn't eat green potatoes. Having said that, no one has ever died from green potato poisoning.

Take no notice of scaremongers. Yes, sometimes there's cause for concern but, believe me, the world will shout soon enough and loudly enough about that. But cadmium in rubber belongs with the green cheese on the moon.

As far as I can ascertain (and I look on a regular basis) there is no evidence anywhere suggesting that ANYTHING leeches from tyre rubber under normal circumstances. Hope that puts your mind at rest.

Thanks for that... it's just one of those things when you're starting out you find and think uh-oh!

I just didn't want to go through all of the effort to eradicate the dodgy stuffs from my diet / life only to be slowly poisoning myself in the process... if you see what I mean.

MKG is quite right. The cadmium in tyres is held in a vice-like grip because it is almost entirely combined with sulphur. The rate of leeching would be measured in terms of centuries and it is highly unlikely that soil contained in tyres would have cadmium levels even slightly higher than normal background.

There are far more likely poisions to worry about...

I honestly don't know what possesses these people to write such webpages without at least first doing some research! I guess it's easier to live of horror stories than to go about putting said stories straight!

Thanks once again... will be turning the rest of the tyres into planters today and carrying on

I just found this thread, which is still current as far as I can see, as in someone just mentioned cadmium leaching from tyres on another forum. I think there are two very well balanced replies here

More to the point, those planters are awesome pics of yours please