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RELATED ARTICLES: Sharjah: where rubber meets the road | Sharjah reveals AED1bn mega projects | Heart of Sharjah gets go ahead
Shortages. Until recently, there was too little of just about anything. As we all know, the construction industry was plagued with a lack of essential materials such as cement, rebar steel and manpower.
The fleet or plant manager, meanwhile, was more concerned with the lack of the round black rubber so essential to keeping their big machines rolling. It seemed everywhere was short of them, and nobody knew where to find the elusive products, short of joining a waiting list, which in some cases was longer than the life of the tyre.
Actually, there was one place where tyres were in abundance, an inexhaustible supply in fact. However, you might not want many of the units in stock on your vehicle – most of them are distinctly past their best. The place? The Sharjah Municipal tyre dump.
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In this vast expanse of the out-of-town desert a seemingly endless pile of tyres stretches in to the distance. Conservative estimates put the number of casings in the pile at around seven million, though as more tyres are thought to have been buried in the sand years ago, the real figure quite frankly is anybody’s guess.
Besides spoiling the wild beauty of the UAE, the tyres cause an enviro-hazard in a number of ways. Firstly, tyres in the ground can ‘leachate’ into the ground water table,but more seriously if the stack was ever to catch fire it would be extremely hard if not impossible to put it out.
Fortunately, the emirate of Sharjah has taken its responsibilities seriously and has actually put its money where its mouth is.
Among the various recycling projects masterminded by Bee’ah, which is a public/private waste management partnership, the flagship has surely got to be the US $50m plant for turning the discarded rubber in to a new material which can be used for making a number of products, the most significant of which is used in a new kind of asphalt for resurfacing roads.
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Click here to see the Bee'ah plant in action
RUBBISH
Anyone who has ever seen a recycling plant of any type in action will know that they all follow a broadly similar pattern. First of all, while the material that is to be recycled is by definition rubbish, if the feedstock is unsuitable then the end product will also be no good.
To this end Bee’ah has started on the seemingly endless task of sorting the tyre mountain into more organized stacks, with the waste piled in rough size order.
Additionally, every ten metres or so, a large sand berm acts as a fire break, so any freak conflagration won’t be totally unmanageable.
To build this, the environmental group has laid its hands on a number of large wheel loaders. We spotted a number of examples of Caterpillar 950H, as well as some newer Volvo L50F models, though there seemed to be a mix and match of equipment brands generally at the site.
Of course, there is no ‘used tyre sorting’ attachment as far as we are aware, so this task falls to a number of guys with pitchforks. With up to 7,000 tyres coming into the dump each day, it is safe to assume that they will not be out of work anytime soon.
From this vast wall of tyres, feedstock is moved up to the ‘in’ gate of the brand-new plant factory. From here a worker physically rolls a tyre into the plant room, where another worker catches it and either puts it on a ‘debeader’ which is a machine similar in appearance to a tyre mounting machine. However, the debeader’s sole purpose is to rip out the largest steel bands in larger tyres.
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FEATURED COMMENT
Please send some detals about rubber 5cm x5cm or 5cm x 10 cm waste rubber /scrap rubber in shredded form 2000 mt per eve