🗼Kuwait turns 42 million rubber tires into an eco-city

Between 2003 and 2020, 42 million used car tires were dumped in the Kuwaiti desert. During those years, three major fires have sent toxic fumes over inhabited areas. The Kuwaiti regime has now decided to do something about this recurring environmental disaster, reports Euronews.

The solution is to move all tires to a plant where they are shredded and pulverized. The result is a rubber material that can be used to make, for example, rubber mats. These mats are used, among other things, as a base in playgrounds and as a floor in gyms.

Rubber tires are difficult to recycle, but now Kuwait has built a special facility just to handle rubber tires. A total of 507,000 tonnes of old tires have been moved to the facility. It takes time to recycle so much material, but according to the plans, three million tires per year will be recycled and become new products.

The area where the tire tip was located has been decontaminated and now an eco-smart city will be built there. South Saad Al Abdullah is the name of the city where 400,000 people are expected to live.

"We intend to use a lot of different solutions for, for example, smart traffic where we will use the latest technology for traffic control and traffic monitoring", says Naser Adel Khraibut at Kuwait's Public Authority for Housing Welfare in a comment to Euronews.

Image: Euronews