Here’s a look at the world’s largest tire cemetery

The huge dump site was a mere 7 km (4 mi) away from a residential suburb. Poisonous black smoke was coming out of the fierce fire from time to time, due to which the residents were upset.

But this month Kuwait, which wants to build 25,000 new homes on the site, ended up moving all the tires to a new location in Al-Salmi, near the Saudi border, where recycling efforts have begun.

At a plant run by the EPSCO Global General Trading Recycling Company, workers sort and cut scrap tires before pressing the particles into rubber-colored floor tiles.

“The factory is helping the society by cleaning the dumped old tires and converting them into consumer products,” said Ala Hassan, Partner and CEO, EPSCO. They also export products to neighboring Gulf countries and Asia, he added.

The company said the EPSCO plant, which started operations in January 2021, can recycle 3 million tires a year.

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Scrap tires are a major environmental problem around the world because of their bulk and the chemicals they can release.

Oil-rich Kuwait, an OPEC member with a population of about 4.5 million, had about 2.4 million vehicles in 2019, Central Bureau of Statistics data shows, up from 1.5 million in 2010.

The government expects Al-Salmi to become a tire recycling hub, with plans for more factories.

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The Al Khair Group transports more than half of all tires to the new site using 500 trucks a day and is planning to open a factory to burn the tires through a process called pyrolysis, according to its CEO Hammoud Al-Maari. he said.

Pyrolysis produces a type of oil that can be sold for use in industrial furnaces such as cement factories, and an ash known as carbon black that can be used in a variety of industries.

This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.