An Anne Arundel County man who illegally dumped and abandoned more than 250,000 scrap tires near the Potomac River in Western Maryland has pleaded guilty to 17 environmental charges, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown announced Friday.

Michael Osei, a 48-year-old from Hanover, was charged in April after leaving the tires packed into tractor trailer containers and strewn across an industrial property in Allegany County, creating a fire hazard and endangering the local air and water quality. Osei pleaded guilty to the crimes, all misdemeanors, last week in the Circuit Court for Allegany County.

“Frankly, it’s shocking that any company would be so reckless as to endanger the health of Marylanders in this way,” Brown said in a press release. “Convictions like this are essential to safeguarding our environment and making it crystal clear that businesses must recycle and dispose of scrap tires lawfully. We simply won’t tolerate such irresponsible behavior.”

An investigation revealed that in 2021, county officials granted Osei a favorable lease on a property in Westernport, near the West Virginia border, to establish a recycling facility for worn, damaged and defective tires. Osei claimed the facility would employ as many as 50 people and that he had already secured contracts worth millions of dollars to send the tires abroad.

But from the time the facility began operations in July 2021, according to the news release, “few tires, if any, were ever removed.”

Inspectors from the Maryland Department of the Environment first visited the site that October and documented around 10,000 to 15,000 scrap tires, which were stored outside and uncovered in heaping piles. The proper handling of scrap tires is regulated by Maryland law in order to minimize health and environmental hazards.

The facility also had no permits, and the environment department contacted the state fire marshal’s office because of how serious the fire risk was, according to the release.

The fire marshal ordered Osei to stop operating the facility on multiple occasions between the fall of 2021 and the spring of 2022. He eventually abandoned the site in September 2022, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of scrap tires. County officials have since begun clearing them.

“Non-compliant tire collection sites pose a great fire danger to the employees, community, and our fire service first responders,” acting State Fire Marshal Jason Mowbray said in the press release. “Across our country, there have been examples of the conflagrations these facilities can create that underscore the true danger.”

Osei is scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Jeffrey Getty on Dec. 17, 2024.