CHENNAI: What can you do with 200 used and discarded tyres? A visit to Senakuppam and Vallakottai villages, just outside Chennai might give you the answer. Two schools, one in each village, now have playgrounds built out of tyres.
An initiative by Apollo Tyres, the pilot programme figures out ways to use old and discarded tyres that cannot be recycled anymore. And these playgrounds are one of the ways in which the tyre manufacturer has put them to use. “As per a research commissioned by us, very soon, India will have more than 100 million end-of-life tyres every year, without proper mechanisms in place to recycle or dispose them off,” said Satish Sharma,president, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, Apollo Tyres.
Inaugurated in the villages’ community schools, each playground has been created using nearly 200 radial tyres and both were identified for the tyre playgrounds, as they lacked play structures. “Apart from making use of end-of-life tyres, these playgrounds also sensitises them on the concept of reuse and recycle,” added Sharma. Depending on the success of this pilot project of creating play structures using worn-out tyres, the company will look at replicating it at multiple locations across the country.
According to Sharma, discarded or end-of-life tyres are increasingly being consumed by the environmentally hazardous pyrolysis units in the unorganised sector.