My wife and I watch 90-Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days. Don’t judge. She enjoys the show and I enjoy the together time.
Anyway, one of the couples is based in the West African Republic of Ghana. In yesterday’s episode (November 3, 2024), the couple was driving through an urban area. Of course, the cameras were mostly focused on the conversation taking place in the back seat, but my attention wandered to the scenery outside the car. A great many of the houses and businesses they passed had huge piles of car/truck tires arranged out front. Some of the tires were arranged in elaborate patterns, not merely piled haphazardly. Some of the tires were quite large, not appropriate for the small, inexpensive cars mostly seen on the roads.
So what is the deal with tires in Ghana? Are there really so many tire shops? Do the tires serve some purpose other than providing traction for motor vehicles?
I wondered if they fill tires with cement or other materials and use them for building foundations. They happen to do that in part of northern Mexico very close to where I live. This is only my guess of course.
Looks like, at least some people, burn them for cooking food:
But, I wonder how many of them are being dumped there from other countries because it’s cheaper to pay Ghana to figure something out than to actually recycle them. IIRC, a lot of plastic ends up dumped in other countries as well.
I did also find this where they mention that scrappers burn the tires to get the metal out of them. But that, at least on it’s own, doesn’t explain why they’re there in the first place. Maybe some combination of hoarding them because they might be worth something, not being able to recycle them fast enough and ending up with them from other countries?
“I find that Michelins give a light, sweet smoke suitable for poultry, as opposed to Goodyears, which emit a more robust smoke more appropriate for red meat.”
Yeah they get lots of the worlds garbage.
Loads and loads of clothing and fabric is dumped there.
The shoreline is so inundated from off dumping the beach is like 6 ft.+ deep in shredded fabric.
I wonder if the people with tires are mostly using them like a fencing material?
I opened the article thinking they had some way of diverting the smoke from the heat source from the food but, no, the article mentions directly cooking on top of the tire fire. Eek!
A little update on this - on the show referenced in the OP (90 Day Fiancé), they toured a home in Ghana this past episode. The American asked about a tire in the house. I was ready for a big answer for this thread! But alas, the person said that particular tire being asked about was squeezed into the doorway to keep the goats that roam the property from coming in to the home.
Seems to me that at least in this particular part of Ghana, tires are sent here as trash and the people who live there use them for whatever they deem practical.
I feel bad for these countries, who become the world’s dump, and they are left to make the best of a bad situation. No one cares.
In AZ we had, for a while, “rubberized roads”, where some new process ground up tires and embedded them in the asphalt. It was really nice. At highway speeds it was noticeably quieter. Especially in my convertible at the time.
I was never able to find out why this was never continued.
In tribal areas of AZ, the locals put old tires on the roofs of their mobile homes. Whatever benefit they gain, it sure does look stupid.
If Germany counts as first world, yes. The link is in German, but the pictures, maps and graphs are clear. The images, btw, paint a rosy picture that does not square at all with reality. It is a very shady business that tries (often successfully) to circumvent European regulations for the safe disposal of hazardous marerial by exporting it at dumping prices as “raw material” for… whatever. Cooking fuel. Fences. Or it is still good for a couple of thousand miles more, probably, if you don’t overload your car and don’t have to brake hard. Hey! 2800 used tires for 6450 €uro! That is a deal you can’t refuse!
Thanks. Google Translate seemed to work well enough that I could understand that they’re offering used car and truck tires for sale in Africa and elsewhere for resale and reuse.
What I can’t imagine is the economics of loading up a container full of used tires to be sent to Ghana just as waste.
They say it is for reuse because otherwise they would have to declare it as waste and would not be allowed to export it. But at 2,30 € per tire it is clear that the tires are not to be used for driving. They are avoiding the cost for safe disposal with European environmentl standards.
The same happens with whole cars: it is expensive to scrap a car in Europe. Sell it to Africa for 50 - 500€, not just one, but thousands, and you have a serious business. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/used-vehicles-get-second-life-africa-what-cost
ETA: At cars(dot)co(dot)za I could not resist the temptation to ask for second hand Rolls Royce. They offer six.
As this is FQ I cannot let this stand uncommented, since it’s obviously wrong: I know people from Ghana, and while poor, as compared to OECD standards, they don’t have 6 ft mounds of textiles on their beaches. This is a picture from Cape Coast in Ghana:
