The house is that easy for termites to eat? (it was built in 74.) Yes, termites can devour a house fairly quickly. You should have a yearly termite inspection and treatment if necessary. Prevention treatments are common, and necessary in some places. Hard to be more specific without knowing where you are. I wonder what would happen if I got a shovel and started removing that safety turf? You would be doing yourself and your bushes a favor. You would also make it possible to add new plants to that area if you would like to. Suppose I replaced it with some topsoil and real mulch? Yes!!! Should i leave the gray weed sheets? Absolutely not. I spose I could leave a little of the safety turf around the trunks of the bushes where I can't reach, and maybe close to the house. You should be able to get to those spots with a rake to get all of the rubber stuff. Just to stop those termites, y'know. I think this mis-info happened through this thought process... Termites eat wood houses. Mulch is wood. Mulch shouldn't be placed up against a house. Termites don't eat rubber. Therefore, rubber mulch stops termites. This is all good but it's that last leap that's wrong. If termites want to eat your house, they'll happily crawl across the rubber mulch to get there, whistling a hungry tune as they go... Does anyone have experience removing this stuff? Rubber mulch, no. Weed fabric and plastic, yes. Ugh. Nasty job removing it but it's the only way to reclaim your space. Even the most ordinary of shrubs needs moisture and organic material. This plastic and rubber stuff is not offering anything beneficial for your planting bed, and is blocking at least some of the water. Real mulch decomposes over time, replenishing nutrients in the soil, and should be renewed on top (not replaced) occasionally. As far as disposal... I need a parking space at the front of the lawn, I'll use it for that. Without knowing where you are, what your soil is like, it's hard to comment specifically on this. What I can imagine, though, is putting this stuff down, and then grass starts growing up in it. Then you want to mow over it, and either the rubber is too high, and/or you end up sending chunks of it flying all over the place. If your soil is mostly clay, parking on it without a thick layer of rocks probably won't work, long-term. If your soil is mostly sand, you should be able to just start parking where you want and the grass will die in the 2 tire tracks, and sand will rise to the top so it's not muddy. An added surface is not necessary.

Agreed, paper layer unnecessary. As long as you pull little weeds when you first see them, you shouldn't have weeds in such copious amounts that you need to smother them. I'm sure the prior corn farming operation had very few weeds going to seed in the field. They spray as much and as many chemicals as necessary to make sure of that. So you're starting with as clean of a slate as possible. Birds & wind will bring weed seeds, but it's a lot easier to spend a minute here, a minute there, then wait until it's "time to do some weeding." The leaf mulch will do a lot for preventing weeds from being able to start growing at all. I find it a lot easier to push aside where you want to plant than to try to not cover plants with leaf/mulch. Some prefer the opposite though. Consider what you would prefer before you start. If you're going to do a bark mulch, I would do it on top of the leaves. It will keep them from blowing or washing away, and that's what the worms and microbes are going to eat first anyway.

^^ Yikes LOL Turns out their is actually a tire ingredient that is now known to actually cause environmental harm, which is the first one I've heard of. All the other warnings in this thread were based on hearsay and "if it's there, it's toxic" which is not exactly the case. 6PPD is added to tires as a preservative for the rubber. Specifically, it reacts with ozone, preventing the ozone from damaging the rubber itself. Unfortunately, the product of that reaction - 6PPD quinone - is leachable and also quite toxic to salmon (and possibly other aquatic critters). Researchers knew for years that something was killing salmon during the mating run in certain streams in the PNW. They have finally pinned down this chemical as a major culprit. After a rain, it washes off the roads into the streams. Of course ozone is required for this to happen, so it is much more likely in urban areas with higher levels of ozone. Anyway it's another reason not to use tire mulch. As an environmental chemist, I was not that concerned with toxicity of other tire ingredients up to this point, but with this stuff, if you live near urban waterways especially, it might be best not to use it. https://cen.acs.org/environment/pollution/Tire-derived-chemical-kills-salmon/98/web/2020/12

Perhaps kimmsr is using the common definition of hazardous waste, but tires have never been a RCRA Hazardous Waste as far as I know. I would not be all that surprised if some contaminants could leach into soil from them, but without a full-on tire fire, I doubt soil under a tire pile would be a HW. They are not clean however, and I wouldn't use rubber in my garden either, but they are not as bad as you make them sound. I may be splitting hairs, since the waste I deal with all day long is so much worse, but there are degrees of toxicity. The vast majority of waste and contaminated soil is classed as Special Waste which goes into your neighborhood sanitary landfill. For better or worse.