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How a ‘tire graveyard’ with over 40 million tires became a sports field near you Credits: Social Media
By Paul Fogarty

How a ‘tire graveyard’ with over 40 million tires became a sports field near you

By Paul Fogarty

Images have emerged online of a tire graveyard in Kuwait where millions upon millions of old vehicle tires had been piled up in the desert sand.

Since those images were captured in 2021, efforts have been made to clear the tire graveyard and the recycled rubber may well have ended up being used to build sports fields in the United States and across the world.

Kuwaits Sulaibiya tire graveyard

For more than 17 years, millions of old tires were dumped at a so-called tire graveyard in Sulaibiya on the outskirts of Kuwait City.

More than 42 million tires were stored at the graveyard according to Reuters and the piles of the discarded rubber were so large that they could be seen from space.

The site was prone to dangerous fires which released plumes of acrid black smoke into the air which disturbed residents living a mere 4 miles (7 km) away.

Following a particularly large fire at the tire graveyard in October 2020, where more than one million tires were burned, Kuwaits Environment Public Authority promised to dispose of the disused tires.

This picture shows used tyres that were transported from a landfil in the north of Kuwait, to Al-Salmi border region near the country's industrial area, where they will be cut or repurposed for local use or for export, on September 1, 2021. - Seventeen years of tyre dumping and three massive fires between 2012 and 2020 sparked environmental concerns, prompting the authorities to shut down the landfil for good and to transform what was once a mammoth "tyre graveyard" to a new residential city.
Photo by YASSER AL-ZAYYAT/AFP via Getty Images

How the tires potentially became a sports field near you

By September 2021, work had begun to remove all of the tires from the Sulaibiya tire graveyard and many were sent to recycling plants, with one of the most notable being a facility run by a company called EPSCO near Kuwaits border with Saudi Arabia.

Here, tires are shredded and turned into a variety of products from rubber flooring tiles – like you might see in a childrens playground – to rubber granules known as crumb rubber.

Crumb rubber is a material commonly used to cover artificial sports fields to help support athletes when running or to cushion any falls. If youve ever played on a field covered in crumb rubber, youll also know that the rubber pellets get absolutely EVERYWHERE.

White stripes on the green soccer field
Getty Images | A. Aleksandravicius

From its recycling plant, EPSCO exports its recycled rubber products to neighboring Gulf countries as well as to nations across Asia.

Two of the biggest exporters of crumb rubber to the United States include China and South Korea, so its entirely possible that some of the rubber granules that have been used on newly built sports fields across America are made up of rubber from tires that were once sitting in the worlds largest tire graveyard.