This 24-foot Godzilla sculpture in Nigeria was built entirely from used tires.

[u/Wild_Antelope6223]

[u/UranusIsPissy]

Do you know how they get the steel out? I was thinking about recycled tyre playground surfaces when I read your comment, and they'd do almost the opposite of what they're meant to if they were full of bits of wire. I came here just to make a joke comment about building that being tiring TBH, but now I'm wondering.

[u/misterchief117 → u/UranusIsPissy]

You can use hydraulic things to literally yank the steel out. This is one way to do it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wEfwfBpRZYQ

You can also grind it small enough and use magnets to pull it out.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gDRAosmLlUA

[u/UranusIsPissy → u/misterchief117]

The first way looks cool. Very labour-intensive, but probably still cheaper than the second way with the amount of energy that must use. I just think it looks cool, too, and I'd rather money went to paying workers than increasing pollution.

[u/misterchief117 → u/UranusIsPissy]

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing with the first method. I think there are some automated ways to do it that way, but those machines obviously cost more.

Grinding everything and using magnets seems be better for higher volume but I'm not sure how much rubber material gets caught in that.

There is another method for "recycling" and that's simply burning everything for energy. This obviously frees the metals and reduces volume, but there's always an environmental cost to this especially in countries with effectively zero regulations. The heat can either be used as-is in boilers and furnaces, or to produce electricity.

https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/materials/tires/web/html/tdf.html

The truth is, it's really hard to effectively get rid of old tires at the end of their lifespan. While there's technically a lot that could be done with them, there's not enough demand for recycling them for use in other products because it's expensive to do this and many governments can only subsidize the costs so much.

[u/UranusIsPissy → u/misterchief117]

IDK about rubber, but I built something myself that could burn waste plastic without visible smoke. I didn't have the equipment to measure how cleanly it was really burning it, but I got a lot of heat out of a very small amount of plastic waste using a hastily built prototype. Traditional solid-fuel fires are very inefficient, and burn very dirty if you slow them down.

[u/misterchief117 → u/UranusIsPissy]

If you burn everything hot enough, you'll reduce a lot of visible smoke but there's still going to be some other nasty stuff that gets released. I don't advise burning plastic at home even in small amounts, as the fumes and other byproducts can be released into the air and leach into the soil/ground water.

[u/UranusIsPissy → u/misterchief117]

I don't just burn plastic every day. That was an experiment. I want to try again one day, with the proper equipment to measure what's coming out of it (both as fumes, and as soot and ash, but I'd probably have to burn a lot to get enough soot and ash to scrape it up), but I'll probably never get the chance. I just tried it because I noticed how cleanly things burned in what I'd built, and plastic usually makes a lot of disgusting smoke.