AN­GLEO JE­DIDI­AH

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UTT) has en­tered a part­ner­ship with the Caribbean In­dus­tri­al Re­search In­sti­tute (CARIRI) which fo­cus­es on the re­cy­cling of waste tyres.

The sign­ing was held at the UTT Ch­agua­nas cam­pus where the new­ly formed Rub­ber Crumb Project was agreed up­on by both in­sti­tu­tions.

Ac­cord­ing to CARIRI, there is an av­er­age of three mil­lion tyres im­port­ed in­to Trinidad and To­ba­go an­nu­al­ly.

With there be­ing lim­it­ed tyre dis­pos­al or re­cy­cling op­tions avail­able, this project is ex­pect­ed to com­bat en­vi­ron­men­tal prob­lems caused by the pol­lu­tion of some 1.5 mil­lion scrap tyres across the coun­try.

“This two-year pi­lot plant will al­low us to look at the com­mer­cial as­pects of util­is­ing waste tyres, turn to rub­ber crumbs to use in as­phalt mix de­signed for road paving or rub­ber tiles or rub­ber mats and so on. So this will al­low us mov­ing for­ward to utilise, to see how well this waste prod­uct can now be utilised to the ben­e­fit of so­ci­ety,” said Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of CARIRI Hans–Erich Schulz.

En­gi­neer­ing stu­dents from UTT are ex­pect­ed to ben­e­fit from this project by be­ing giv­en the op­por­tu­ni­ty to in­ter­act with the man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties used to break down the tyres in­to re­fined raw ma­te­ri­als.

Busi­ness stu­dents will al­so be able to in­ter­act with the busi­ness mod­el that is ex­pect­ed to gen­er­ate in­come and em­ploy­ment.

“It’s a sort of a re­al-world ap­pli­ca­tion for some­thing that prob­a­bly hasn’t been done be­fore. And we are look­ing to work with a uni­ver­si­ty, UTT in this case. And with a plant on the South cam­pus lo­ca­tion to look and see what re­al world ap­pli­ca­tion can be ap­plied us­ing waste prod­uct,” Schulz said.