Laura Zabo - Upcycled belts and accessories from reused bike tyres (15% discount)

[jefmcg]

Would they? Bike (and motor vehicle) tyres are collected separately at the household waste recycling centre, so I hoped they were having their steel beads stripped and the rest recycled like the council website says... but turning them into belts and accessories would probably use less energy.

You might be right about recycling, but we still have huge piles all over the country that aren't being recycled. Not sure how many uses there is for old tyres, google says rubber underlay but I have probably walked on less rubber underlay than I have worn out old car tyres.

And we as a country aren't handling the tyre "pyres" well

(googling for that found me a lot of similar stories more recently)

The order of the 3 - sustainable - Rs is: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

I think Laura's business is somewhere between reuse and recycle. Better to put our old tyres on another bike, but that's impossible (for me, at least, because I don't take them off until they are done). Repurposing them as belts is better than turning them into something completely new.

 

[Ian H]

Wikipedia is interesting about the problems with and ways of recycling tyres.