Main content

Turning tyres into cheap fuel & football pitches

The entrepreneurs using clever chemistry to turn scrap rubber into fuel and car tyres.

Meet the entrepreneurs using scrap rubber to fuel cars and make new tyres.

Each year, over a billion car tyres reach the end of their life.

They’re notoriously hard to recycle and present an environmental hazard if left to disintegrate out in the open.

But around the world, people are trying to clean up their cities by finding new uses for the mountains of rubber waste.

In Senegal, a young entrepreneur is turning them into artificial football pitches. In Zambia, an engineer is perfecting a way to turn these tyres into diesel. And in Canada, a company is making new tyres out of old ones using some very clever chemistry.

Francois Wibaux delves into the solutions.

Available now

23 minutes

Last on

Tue 12 Apr 2022 21:06GMT

Broadcasts

  • Tue 12 Apr 2022 07:06GMT
  • Tue 12 Apr 2022 14:06GMT
  • Tue 12 Apr 2022 21:06GMT

People fixing the world on YouTube

Watch stories of people changing their world on the World Service English YouTube channel