KUWAIT CITY: Kuwait on Sunday announced plans to transform what was once a mammoth “tyre graveyard” to a new residential city.

The 2-square-kilometre (0.7-square-mile) dump in the north of the oil-rich Gulf country was where tyres went to die — a total of more than 40 million at the end.

Seventeen years of tyre dumping and three massive fires between 2012 and 2020 sparked environmental concerns, prompting the authorities to shut it down for good.

“We have moved from a difficult stage that was characterised by great environmental risk,” Oil Minister Mohammed al-Fares said at the now empty landfill some five kilometres from Al-Jahra province.

“Today the area is clean and all tyres have been removed to begin the launch of the project of Saad Al-Abdullah city.” In past months, trucks loaded with tyres had made more than 44,000 trips from the landfill to Al-Salmi region, near Kuwait’s industrial area, where Fares said they will be temporarily stored. He said the tyres will be cut or repurposed for local use or for export, adding that storage would meet “international standards... in case of fire”.

According to Sheikh Abdullah Al-Sabah, director general of the Environment Public Authority, Kuwait plans to recycle all the tyres and avoid the need for another landfill.

“There is already a factory today that repurposes them, and we hope to find other manufacturer to contribute to help end the tyres issue,” he said.

Alaa Hassan, head of EPSCO Global General Contracting, said her firm extracts raw materials from tyres, including elements used to pave roads and sidewalks.

She said EPSCO has the capacity to cut or repurpose approximately two millions tyres a year, in cooperation with other factories.

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2021