If you dumped more than 50 million tires in one spot
over a period of 20 years, this is what you get. Just like one of mankind's greatest achievements,
the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, the tire graveyard in Kuwait, could also be seen from space!
You have to realize, this is not just one layer of tires on the surface.
These are massive piles. In fact, huge crater looking holes were excavated,
where the tires were then dumped into. And Just like that, this dump site at Sulaibiya became
the largest tire graveyard in the world, which is kind of a big deal, especially for Kuwait.
If you don’t know much about this small country in the Middle East, you might be
surprised to find out that the Kuwaiti dinar is the highest-valued unit of currency in the world.
Based on their GDP per capita, Kuwait is one of the richest countries in the world,
thanks to their oil-rich economy and somewhat bizarre demographics.
Out of the 4.5 million people who live in Kuwait, only 33% are Kuwaiti citizens.
The remaining 3 million people are foreign nationals who work and live there.
They'd love to become citizens, but not only do they need to live there for 20 years,
they also need to be Muslim-born or converted, and be practicing Islam for at least five years.
For such a wealthy country, hosting the world’s largest tire graveyard wasn’t a good look,
especially considering that their neighbor, Qatar, was hosting … the 2022 World Cup!
So the government finally took action,
and the rubber met the road, but the reason, is Not What You Think!
Between 2012 and 2020, there were 3 major fires at this tire graveyard.
These fires were due to the high air temperatures in the country.
Huge amounts of toxic chemicals were released into the air during these fires.
The fact that the tire graveyard was located right next to the residential suburb of Al-Jahra,
didn’t help, with the residents being fed up with these recurring fire incidents.
To really appreciate the magnitude of this problem, this is what that
huge fire looked like from space. That’s just a small corner of the tire graveyard.
The thing is, massive tire fires are not uncommon. In February of 1990, a pile of 14 million tires at
a dump location in Hagersville, Ontario, Canada, was set ablaze by five teenagers. Despite fire
fighters' best efforts, the fire burned for 17 days, forcing 4000 people to evacuate their homes.
So after repeated fires, the government of Kuwait finally announced that multiple
facilities would be established in order to relocate the tires and recycle them,
and I gotta say, they seem to have delivered on their promise.
A comparison of satellite photos shows that by September of 2021,
all tires had been moved from their original location to multiple recycling facilities.
But what did they exactly do with those 50 million tires?
Tires are made up of rubber for traction, carbon black for durability, and metal wires for
structure. Using a thermochemical process known as pyrolysis, tires are heated up at 840F. The
rubber element is transformed into a gas, which is then cooled, and sold as a liquid biofuel.
Once the chamber temperature drops, the carbon black char is extracted into large bags and put
away. Finally, the chamber is opened, and what’s left behind? A massive spool of metal wires.
The wires are water sprayed to minimize spoilage
before they are pulled out using a small crane, and sent for recycling.
If you’ve ever had to clean up a clogged shower drain, you would have pulled something
like that out of the drain … you know what I’m talking about … The similarities are uncanny!
There are also other ways to recycle tires. Shredding is one of them. The rubber bits
are then pressed and turned into things like rubber tiles, which can be used in construction.
It is estimated that 1 billion end-of-life tires are generated every year,
and there are currently 4 billion tires in landfills and stockpiles worldwide.
We could have the Earth covered in beautiful flowers, like this … wait!
Those are not flowers. They are bicycles, and they are not parked here for the day.
This, is a bicycle graveyard in China.
Bike sharing gained popularity in China in the mid-2010s, with the first large-scale bike-sharing
program launched in Beijing in 2014. The bike-sharing trend quickly spread to other cities
across the country, with companies like Ofo, Mobike, and Bluegogo competing for market share,
and that meant large-scale and quick expansions of many bike-sharing companies into many cities.
At its peak, there were 70 bike-sharing companies operating in China and by 2017, China had become
the world's largest bike-sharing market, with an estimated 16 million shared bikes on the streets.
But it soon became evident that the growth had vastly and rapidly outpaced the immediate demand.
Many cities were overwhelmed, due to lack of regulations and infrastructure to handle a
flood of shared bicycles on their streets. For example, in 2017, the maximum number of bikes
that the city of Beijing could tolerate was 1.2 million. But bike-sharing companies had
distributed 2.3 million bikes in Beijing, almost double the city’s maximum capacity.
This massive oversupply meant that many bikes would inevitably end up parked in inappropriate
areas of the city. As a consequence of that, vast piles of impounded, abandoned,
and broken bikes became a familiar sight in many big cities. The city’s maintenance workers and
the larger bike-sharing companies quickly started collecting the bikes and moving them out of sight.
In the years that followed, the bike-sharing industry in China
experienced a rapid consolidation, with many smaller companies going bankrupt
and the larger players merging or exiting the market. By March of 2018, 34 of the
70 bike-sharing companies had gone bankrupt, and as a result, the bikes were not being reclaimed.
This is how thousands of bikes ended up stacked up dismally into piles.
The bicycle dump sites across China have anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 bicycles each.
Today, bike sharing remains a popular transportation option in many Chinese
cities, although the market has stabilized and
is no longer growing at the same breakneck pace as it was in 2017.
Having learned about the world’s largest tire graveyard and largest bicycle graveyards,
can you take a wild guess on what this graveyard is for?
This is a “regular” graveyard, regular as in where people are buried, but compared to
typical cemeteries, An Bang cemetery near the city of Hue in Vietnam is out of this world.
But with the widespread poverty throughout most of Vietnam, how could these villagers possibly
afford building such elaborate and expensive tombs, some of which cost more than $70,000?
For reference, the average salary in Vietnam is about $150 per month.
These Vietnamese villagers believe that having a decorated tomb will bring the family good fortune.
Honoring their ancestors is an important part of Vietnamese people’s lives.
After the end of the Vietnam War and the reunification of the country in 1975,
many residents left this area and went to live and work in Western countries.
They would then send money to their relatives back home, and with the favorable exchange rate from
US dollars to the Vietnamese dong, that’s their currency, An Bang became one of the
richest villages in Vietnam. The residents invested a big portion of that money into
building these elaborate tombs, decorated with colorful mosaics, dragons and towers.
Each tomb in the An Bang Cemetery is built for an entire family, not for just one person. Many
of these tombs are fully equipped with bathrooms, kitchens and personal objects. Being almost like
a little town where no one lives anymore, the cemetery is also referred to as City of Ghosts.
An Bang cemetery is the largest cemetery in Vietnam,
a popular tourist attraction, and probably one of the coolest graveyards in the world.