An Anne Arundel County resident pleaded guilty last week to 17 environmental charges stemming from more than 250,000 tires left on an abandoned industrial site in Western Maryland.
Michael Osei, 48, of Hanover, was charged earlier this year in connection with the heaps of scrap tires left at an industrial site in Westernport. Investigators said that Allegany County officials had leased Osei the site adjacent to the Potomac River after he approached the county’s Office of Economic Development proposing a scrap tire recycling facility, the Attorney General’s office said in a news release.
In the June 2021 discussion, Osei had “claimed that the facility would eventually employ up to 50 people and already had millions of dollars’ worth of contracts to send the recycled tires overseas,” according to the news release. He started operations the next month and collected hundreds of thousands of tires — but “few tires, if any, were ever removed,” prosecutors said in the release.
Inspectors from the Maryland Department of the Environment documented around 10,000 to 15,000 tires on the site in a complaint following the site visit that October. The tires were left in “heaping piles” at the facility, which had no permits, prosecutors said.
Environmental regulators and the Office of the State Fire Marshal ordered Osei to stop his operations, and the Hanover resident ultimately abandoned the site in September 2022, leaving more than 250,000 scrap tires at the facility, prosecutors said.
Allegany County officials have begun cleaning up the tires, according to the release.
Osei is scheduled for sentencing in Allegany Circuit Court on Dec. 17, according to court records.