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Thursday, July 10, 2025

Beckles: Old tyres to be used to pave bad roads

by

532 days ago
20240125
Rubber Crumb Plant facilities maintenance assistant Collin Chanko, centre, gives Planning and Development Minister Pennelope Beckles, right, CARIRI CEO Hans-Erich Schulz and others a tour of the plant at the University of Trinidad and Tobago Campus in San Fernando yesterday.

Rubber Crumb Plant facilities maintenance assistant Collin Chanko, centre, gives Planning and Development Minister Pennelope Beckles, right, CARIRI CEO Hans-Erich Schulz and others a tour of the plant at the University of Trinidad and Tobago Campus in San Fernando yesterday.

RISHI RAGOONATH

Trinidad and To­ba­go faces the an­nu­al chal­lenge of dis­card­ing over a mil­lion used tyres, which of­ten clog up rivers and cre­ate an en­vi­ron­men­tal haz­ard.

But Plan­ning Min­is­ter Pen­ne­lope Beck­les says re­search be­ing done by the Caribbean In­dus­tri­al Re­search In­sti­tute (CARIRI) and the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T (UTT), shows that old tyres can be re­pur­posed for road paving and the cre­ation of new rub­ber prod­ucts.

Speak­ing to re­porters dur­ing a tour of a $1 mil­lion Rub­ber Crumb Pro­duc­tion Fa­cil­i­ty in Tarou­ba, San Fer­nan­do yes­ter­day, Beck­les said CARIRI is cur­rent­ly ex­per­i­ment­ing to as­sess the dura­bil­i­ty of the rub­ber mix­ture for road paving. 

She said rub­ber crumbs can al­so be used for man­u­fac­tur­ing rub­ber mats, lin­ings and oth­er prod­ucts for use in sport­ing and recre­ation­al fa­cil­i­ties.

Asked whether rub­ber crumbs in as­phalt paving could be help­ful to re­duce T&T’s bi­tu­men short­ages, Beck­les said this was not her area of tech­ni­cal ex­per­tise. How­ev­er, she said the test re­sults of the rub­ber crumb pi­lot project will be shared with the Works and Trans­port Min­istry for fur­ther as­sess­ment and analy­sis.

“Every per­son here to­day un­der­stands the sig­nif­i­cance of a project of this na­ture. It has tak­en a while in com­ing and I am pleased that CARIRI and UTT have seen to the use of tyres for projects like these,” Beck­les said.

She not­ed that the project has gen­er­at­ed in­ter­est from the Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (SWM­COL) as it can help re­duce the bur­den on the na­tion’s land­fills. She al­so said the project will al­low peo­ple to earn rev­enue from old tyres.

Say­ing it was part of the gov­ern­ment’s eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion strate­gies, Beck­les said rub­ber crumbs have been used suc­cess­ful­ly in oth­er coun­tries for paving works in sport­ing fa­cil­i­ties and man­u­fac­ture of prod­ucts.

Mean­while, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of CARIRI Hans-Erich Schulz said T&T gen­er­ates 1.5 mil­lion used tyres an­nu­al­ly.

Many of these tyres end up in land­fills and are breed­ing grounds for mos­qui­toes, Schulz lament­ed.

“We are test­ing the tech­ni­cal fea­si­bil­i­ty for util­i­sa­tion of these tyres for road paving. Lat­er to­day we will be paving a strip of road­way in Tunupuna. An­oth­er test strip will be paved us­ing a stan­dard as­phalt mix de­sign,” he re­vealed.

He added: “Over the next year we will be test­ing and mon­i­tor­ing it to see how well it holds up to weath­er and traf­fic. The idea is to use hard da­ta.”

Schulz al­so agreed that the rub­ber crumb fa­cil­i­ty of­fers a way to safe­ly dis­pose of old tyres and re­cy­cle them for us­es which are both en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly ben­e­fi­cial.

Mean­while, UTT pres­i­dent Pro­fes­sor Prakash Per­sad said the project was part of the uni­ver­si­ty’s man­date to pro­mote re­search and de­vel­op­ment. He said aside from the rub­ber crumbs fa­cil­i­ty, UTT stu­dents have de­vel­oped in­no­v­a­tive prod­ucts, in­clud­ing a spe­cial brew made with chatagne seeds, pro­vid­ing a cof­fee-like taste.


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