Over the last couple of weekends I've been traveling the highways and backroads of NY. It's quite enjoyable on the back roads, passing farms of corn and soybeans in different stages of growth, the big swoops of numerous windmills, and the cows and animals serving our population.

However, on the highways, the amount of pieces of tires is astonishing. I stopped counting when I hit 100. 

The pieces of tire you see on the road come from tractor-trailers. Typically, these shredded chunks of rubber are tires that have begun shedding layers of rubber and blowing out the tire due to under inflation and/or excessive speed.

Shredded tires are often older tires that have been retreaded.  Rather than paying for new tires, trucking companies add additional layers to old tires so that the tread surface is fresh.

So be careful out there on our "rubber" roads.