Tyres again

Further to reference 1, I did get bored this afternoon and dig a little harder into the matter of tyres.

A quick skim of the start of reference 2 suggests that dumped tyres are something of a menace in North America, with an awful lot of them being dumped in the US-Mexican border region. Could they somehow be processed into a wall?

While references 2 and 3 together seem to be telling us that if you have large piles of rubber, particularly if it has been shredded to get the volume down, whether it is underground or not, you are going to have fires as a result of spontaneous combustion, rather in the way that you often get spontaneous combustion in compost, silage and badly ventilated hay. The resultant tyre fires are very hard to put out and, in one way or another, are polluting. So it looks as if straight land fill is not the answer.

Pyrolysis, a more controlled form of burning, is discussed by both Monbiot and at reference 2. There has been a lot of investment in this technology, but the conclusion of reference 2 is that the technology does not yet work well enough. So perhaps Monbiot had done his homework after all - although not to the point of providing a magic bullet.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/tyres.html.

Reference 2: Scrap Tires: Handbook on Recycling Applications and Management for the U.S. and Mexico - Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery, United States Environmental Protection Agency - 2010.

Reference 3: http://www.hse.gov.uk/rubber/spontaneous.htm.