January 29, 2020 Why Tires Should be Recycled

3 ways recycling tires help the environment.

Have you ever come across the saying, “One’s man trash is another man’s treasure?”

In 2020, recycling is a valuable practice, and it comes with several benefits, including sustaining the earth that we live in.

Now, before we look at the environmental benefits of recycling tires, let’s first see what exactly is recycling.

Recycling is simply defined as renewing or rather re-purposing unwanted products.

Numerous products such as paper, plastic, and tin are easily recycled and can be transformed into reusable materials, but there’s one product that goes under the radar when it comes to recycling.

Rubber especially used tire are quite a challenge to recycle due to their large volume, resilience, and the fact that they contain elements that pose a threat to the environment as well as our health. They also easily become breeding ground for pests and insects such as mosquitoes, which are responsible for transmitting various infections.

That said, tyres can be recycled, and there’re numerous environmental reasons why you would want to recycle tires, and in the article below, we shall explore the top three reasons.

Conserve Landfill Space

A report by Popular Mechanics indicates that approximately 11% of the waste tires are dumped into landfills, and it usually takes up to 100 years for a tire to decompose.

Now, given their size and rate of usage, it’s not far-fetched to assume that the waste tires can easily fill up finite resources like a landfill space.

Currently, our landfills are already overcrowded, and the scrap tires make up a huge chunk of waste in these landfills.

Besides filling up our natural resources, there are also the health and environmental concerns that come with filling up the landfills with tires.

Tires have the unfortunate habit of trapping gases such as methane in the void spaces. With time, these gases normally bubble up through the landfills, and the result is they rip the landfill liners designed for preventing contaminants from accessing the local surface and groundwater.

With tire recycling, however, it’s easier to conserve the landfill space and save the local surface from contamination. Recycling will easily eliminate the big and bulky tires, therefore leaving more space in the landfills for items that cannot be recycled.

Keeps the Tires out of Waterways and Soil

Dumps filled with scrap tires normally result in the pollution of water resources. See, as the tired decompose, they release chemicals into the soil and water that are harmful to the environment.

To understand more about this problem, you’ll first need to have a rudimentary understanding of the basic components of a tire.

Generally, tires contain various elements such as natural rubber, polymer fabrics, carbon steel, fillers, silica, and more.

It’s the heavy metals such as silica and chemicals that usually of concern; as the tires disintegrate, some of these elements seep into the ground, through a process known as leeching.

Now, some of these elements have carcinogenic and mutagenic properties, and will normally contaminate the soil around.

Even worse, these elements can equally contaminate the groundwater nearby, and if the poisoned water comes into contact with animals and humans, it can endanger their lives as well.

Prevent Air Pollution

Another key benefit of recycling tires means that the air isn’t getting polluted by burning the tires.

See, it’s common to see individuals burning the tires, but this does more harm than good to the environment.

As we saw earlier, carbon is among the major components on tires, and so, by burning them, you’re polluting the environment as it releases carbon and other toxic elements into the atmosphere.

Recycling, on the other hand, uses environmentally-safer methods, and it is unlikely it will cause any air pollution.

Conclusion

There’re numerous reasons why you want to recycle the tires as opposed to using crude means of disposal.

Recycling will go a long way to greenify our environment and keep us safe.

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