The World’s Biggest Tire Graveyard in Kuwait Is on Fire | Hacker News Reader

The World’s Biggest Tire Graveyard in Kuwait Is on Fire

scoopempire.com

169 pointsvinnyglennon103 comments

Maybe they were ordered to clean up. This is a popular hazardous substances disposal scheme in EU:

You rent a warehouse/piece of land in Poland claiming to be a transportation/construction/recycling company usually using forged documents or homeless person fronting whole thing.

You get paid to remove hazardous waste from UK/Scandinavia/Germany, you stockpile until the place is full.

Finally you either set the place on fire to cover your tracks, or the owner stops receiving payments, discovers whats stored on his property and decides to take insurance hit instead of having his assets blocked for several years while courts try to figure out if/what/who is going to pay for lawful disposal.

Just 2 days ago https://wielun.naszemiasto.pl/kolejny-pozar-skladowiska-w-na... already mentions one from one week earlier. https://portalkomunalny.pl/gospodarka-odpadami/pozary-sklado... Usually couple a month up to one a week, year after year for the last >10 year. Seemingly no political will to fight this scheme.

*Maybe they were ordered to clean up.*

I would love to believe that would be the case as it would show there was some effort given, no matter how bad the implementation was. Unfortunately, Kuwait is ran by decade-old mass negligence that runs from small institutions/businesses all the way up to the government.

I think the funniest thing happened about this situation is that we never knew about the fire but from the international media picked it up THEN the local media picked up on it. It's even more comical when you realize how tiny Kuwait is.

Source: A Kuwaiti.

Or if you're more conscientious, you ship it to China instead. Then, of course, one day COVID hits, China closes its borders and your green, eco-friendly, carbon-reducing recycling facility grinds to a halt because the plastic keeps coming but you can't ship it away.

China stopped accepting most recycling waste in 2019 before COVID hit.

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/20/750864036/u-s-recycling-indus...

In Poland this has been going on for years. It has nothing to do with China and covid.

>Then, of course, one day COVID hits, China closes its borders

I doubt China closed its borders to cargo because of covid.

> Or if you're more conscientious, you ship it to China instead

Are you seriously claiming that the Chinese government is better than the Polish government at making sure this kind of trash is handled correctly?

I feel this must have been sarcasm, probably related to how sending plastic to a recycling facility was just as likely to end up in the ocean thanks to China buying it off of recycling dealers (for ballast IIRC, can't send all those cargo ships back empty)

It wasn't sarcasm.

No, it actually was. Source: I wrote that comment.

Okay, seems like it was hijacked. My comment ("Are you seriously claiming that the Chinese government is better than the Polish government at making sure this kind of trash is handled correctly?") is currently at -4.

Your sarcasm meter is likely broken I'm afraid

In other news, landfills in Romania have legal issues and waste disposal companies can't afford to do their work with the revenue from government contracts because the EU decided to mandate 50% waste recycling and high standards for landfills. So waste gets dumped on the streets and landfills operate illegally.

Sometimes high standards for environmental protection obviously have the opposite effect of their intent.

The Schengen area shouldn't have been expanded so rapidly, IMO.

Btw, what we in Scandinavia mostly read about is the constant flow of stolen goods to e.g. Poland and neighbouring countries. This was interesting to read about.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Schengen had a lot more effect on the border checks for people than it did on the border checks for goods, which were next to non-existent already.

And at the same time not. Schengen abolished border checks for vehicles passing national borders.

Border checks for goods were not next to non-existent pre-Schengen. They caught a lot of stuff. At least in Sweden.

Those were spot checks at best. The amount of internal goods traffic within the EU is astounding, you're looking at 10 million tons per year.

I actually ran the numbers, napkin style, a while ago. I think an efficient border control was happening, and still could be happening soon, if we were to re-implement it.

I was looking at whether it would be financially prudent for Sweden to start up border checks again to stop the flow of stolen goods out of the country. The conclusion was a clear yes.

I believe it and can you show the numbers?

The amount of intraeuropean libel is truly outrageous. Such things are often presented without much context and comparison to crime inside the particular country and other misdeeds such country allows for. For example we in Poland often read about Scandinavians ruining the fish in Baltic sea by fishing way above their qoutas and getting away with it, without replenishing the fish population. I'm sur Scandinavians could say sth on their defence, but most media don't bother to double check the facts on each side because sensationalism and strengthening stereotypes get more eyeballs.

Did you already forget what my comment was commenting? It was literally just one step away.

Yeah that shit's like "made in China = bad" by now. But I'm not surprised northern countries keep "reporting" on it.

Oh no, we found a dozen servers and power tools in some Polish guy's car, must be stolen, they can't afford to buy them second hand!

Jesus wept.

I can't imagine that borders would prevent this kind of dumps.

The difference is that when the borders were still up illegal goods movements were detected more frequently, but most of this waste movement is and was perfectly legal under EU single market rules. The 'four freedoms' explicitly spell this out.

This brings up the whole Multi-speed Europe thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-speed_Europe

Regardless, anyway you view it, these dumpings are a failure of the particular way the current EU has been implemented. There were other options.

Reminds one of the Polish, (but globally applicable) pre war joke, re-made during the communist era: "How could you allow your warehouse to burn down, empty!?"

the joke would be that you should claim that the actually empty warehouse burn down full, to claim insurance on the content, right?

that reminds me of a rumor that I heard about the Atlantic Conveyor (UK merchant ship carrying military equipment sunk during the Falklands War): many military units claimed their equipment was on the ship (and thus lost), presumably to get replacements, that in the end the ship was supposed to carrying more supplies than its capacity

I think there is also a similar story told in Chickenhawk, which is Robert Mason's retelling of his Vietnam war experiences. It may be that he presented it as a rumour too though. Off-topic: I enjoyed Chickenhawk much more than I would have expected from the synopsis. This random person on the web here (me) highly recommends it!

Over capacity and negligence on the part of someone who was supposed to check that are fairly good reasons for a legitimate vessel with too much stuff to get lost.

More plausibly everyone claimed what they should have been shipping, good luck proving who over-claimed and under-shipped.

Same happening in Romania

Now the tires, next time will be the car batteries

Aren't car batteries quite valuable and heavily recycled.

Yes, but they usually break them up first, releasing the reactive, lead heavy acid into the ground. The lead itself is packaged and shipped, leaving the plastic casing and acid in the ground. Used to be normal practice for scrap yards the world over.

this is sad

Why not just formalise the whole system and ship the waste to waste-to-energy plants?

This waste is very toxic and very expensive to dispose of properly. Hence, Polish gangs make a ton of money by charging western industrial clients for properly disposing of their toxic waste, and then just dumping this waste wherever in Poland. There were probably hundreds of cases of discovered illegal toxic waste dumps across Poland in the past years (and who knows how many were not discovered yet). Just in one recent case, the city of Sosnowiec will have to pay around 20 million euros (a non-negligible part of the city budget) to dispose of waste left in one lot by some gang.

Fortunately, Polish authorities are slowly catching up to this and are creating special police units dedicated to fight this kind of crime.

Hah, classic "green" countries.

Gulf State places aren't good places to live in if you are a migrant worker

If you only have a small amount of hazmat you find someone who's renting storage trailers and pay them cash, fill the trailer(s) and then drop off the face of the earth.

If you just have tires you can make a pile visible from the road. Given enough time some teenagers with a flare gun will make them go away.

Hmm, this (or a previous) fire is already visible in the Google Maps satellite view.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sulaibiya,+Kuwait/@29.2573...

However, the tire pile arrangements look different than in the photo in the article...

Interesting that this satellite imagery is so recent. I tried panning over to the Dixie fire in California, which has been burning for a month, and it still shows unburned forest. So maybe what is showing up on Google is a different, earlier fire?

Bit of sleuthing shows that the photo is claimed to be taken on "April 29, 2021" http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-04/29/c_139915543.htm

Meanwhile Getty has the satellite picture dated as "April 15, 2021" https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/maxar-closeup-...

So they are likely showing same event, Maxar is pretty good at getting images of current events as they happen. Don't know what sort of deal they have with Google to show them on Maps though.

Yeah, this article seems to mix up a few things. There have been previous fires at this site:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulaibiya#Tire_graveyard

the tire pile arrangements look different than in the photo in the article

Is it possible they have moved some of the tires out of the way to create a fire break?

Hmm, that is enormous. At least it looks like just one pile is burning at present.

My understanding is whenever Iraq lit the oil wells on fire they just pumped up seawater to help with extinguishing the blaze. I wonder if that sort of thing could work here? Basically just flood the area with seawater.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting the photo, but I saw the path as a firebreak, like they were using the vehicles to separate the burning tires from the rest of them.

USSR nuked a gas well - an inferno was raging for 3 years and nothing elae could stop it.

"On that cold autumn day in 1966, an underground tremor of unprecedented force shook the [ground] with a sparse grass cover on white sand. A dusty haze rose over the desert. The orange colored torch of the blazing well diminished, first slowly, then more rapidly, until it flickered and finally died out. For the first time in 1,064 days, quiet descended on the area. The jet-like roar of the gas well had been silenced"

Actually they did that around six or so times from what I understand. All those were underground, so it probably is a net win for environment.

my guess is that the problem is the assignment of responsibility and the requirement to pay for cleanup - the technology is available and already nearby

Unfortunately, that's usually the case.

I wonder what impact the chemicals in the smoke have on the water treatment plant that is visible nearby

FTA: “ You may wonder why such flammable and hazardous material is stored in a place where weather conditions exceed 50 degrees Celsius”

Not to be too snarky, but if you wonder this, you don’t have much of a grasp of how fire works. This wasn’t spontaneous combustion, and tires burn just as well at 2* as they do at 50*…

I thought the same thing. Looking at the last 18 months of utter and complete quantitative illiteracy on display in journalistic institutions covering COVID, I'm not surprise at this absurdly simplistic thinking on other subjects.

Edit: You weren't being snarky, and have every right to complain about ignorant, non-analytical people being given a platform to write foolish statements like "it's hot there so fires start easier".

The article read like it was written by GPT, I don't think we can read too much into any "analysis" it makes, it's just filler to get to a word count.

The Sun thinks the same -

"Many have questioned the wisdom of storing such combustible materials in a country where the temperatures brush 50C." - https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15778161/worlds-biggest-gravey...

So does the Australian government - "The higher the temperature the more likely it is that a fire will start or continue to burn. This is because the fuel is closer to its ignition point at high temperatures and pre-heated fuel loads burn faster." - https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/community-safety/bus...

I think to prove they are wrong is complicated. What they say is true. Intuition also makes people think it's true (anyone who's started a fire on a hot day knows it rips).

You have to simulate this effect is orders of magnitude lower than the other effects. Of which it's still hard to know which one that counts. Is it wind speed or the missing moisture or are they the same order of magnitude?

But one shouldn't complain about an article that thinks tires tires get executed when they are old, that's cute - "filled to the brim with executed car tires"

Fires at tire recycling plants are all too common.

There are good techniques for recycling tires. May not be profitable, but they work.[1]

When looking at YouTube videos of tire recycling operations, take a close look at the throughput. If the beginning is a front-end loader dumping in a load of tires, that's good. If it's one guy lifting a tire onto a conveyor, they're not serious about it.

[1] https://youtu.be/UWyLzXHqJSs

I went to a high school where the running track was part tar and part ground up auto tire. It was by far the best track I ever ran on.

Documentary showing the Kuwait tire facility. Close up view of the yard including the boss wearing a business suit and tie in the middle of the desert. https://youtu.be/y0ah6QZpI3M?t=44

So competitive for status - just had to show up Springfield by being larger, eh?( https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Springfield_Tire_Yard ).

I used to live in a tiny town with a huge pile of tires out in a lot next to the airstrip.

It caught fire and burned all month. They couldn't extinguish the flames, and we lived with heavy black smoke asphalt air for weeks.

You could pile dirt on it until the fire ran out of oxygen, if we had autonomous earth moving equipment that could take the intense heat.

Or you might try to shock it to smother it, but at scale that would have to be an air-fuel blast that would have wiped out the whole village.

The town was especially good at blowing stuff up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetic_Materials_Research...

Someone posted this video [1] on reddit [2] last week. The fire seems smaller. So the fire has been burning continuously for weeks?

[1] https://gfycat.com/knobbylimitedcormorant

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/owccqc/t...

> Miraculously, the smoke was blown away to the direction of the sea, and not inland.

That actually seems like the worst outcome. According to the satellite photo in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28131932, it looks like Kuwait City is between the landfill and the sea. Inland looks like it's mostly desert.

The wording also suggests that polluting the sea would be more acceptable than polluting land area.

Well, the ocean dillutes whatever you dump into it to much lower concentrations than the rivers do when you dump something into their drainage basins.

I think we unsuccessfully conducted a similar experiment with the atmosphere already.

There's a huge difference between things like global CO2 emissions, and this single fire which is probably a tiny insignificant fraction of that.

The attitude that the oceans are huge and that it is just a minor event here or there that could not possibly affect the sea a lot is exactly the source of the problem. A fire here, a garbage patch there, some mercury from gold mining, ... it just adds up.

It adds up sure, but this is an issue of lesser evils.

It’s better to have a ton of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere than into my living room. That’s not to say either are good.

All that had to be done was to cordon it into zones like in the bottom left.

How can the World's Biggest Tire Graveyard hold only 7 million tires? Presumably they go through that many tires roughly every every year or two in Kuwait.

Great question.

TIL that most disposed tires, in the US at least, are used for all sorts of things; some are even burned intentionally for "pyrolysis".

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire_recycling

https://www.treehugger.com/americas-tire-mountains-percent-a...

Excuse the source, but it seems factually correct. It's a problem that was solved 30+ years ago in relatively high-functioning countries.

Either there are many tire dumps, many are recycled, or a combination of both.

Let alone the entire world.

We need to chemically dissolve old tires. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/GC/C9GC0...

Allegedly there is a problem with thieves burning these piles to get the steel belts inside the tires which hold some value.

That must smell awesome and is probably really healthy. Perhaps it won't be the largest tire graveyard for long.

In small concentrations like you'd get downwind it smells like burnouts, not great, not too bad. In high concentrations tire smoke is pretty acrid and should be avoided.

This is horrific, and so is the "journalism" on display in this article.

How did this tire fire start? Zero information written.

What are the 4 companies? Zero information written.

How realistic is the "plan to recycle 95% of the tires" and "replace them with sustainable housing". Zero.

What efforts are being undertaken to put the fire out? Zero info.

I could be forgiving if it didn't come off as so aggressively lazy and unprofessional.

Look at the author of the piece: "Aya is an aspiring journalist who is into everything related to culture. A curious explorer and traveler, she graduated from the faculty of Arts with one mission in mind: experience everything. She is interested in filmmaking and scriptwriting and hopes to one day write her own feature film."

can you expect "journalism" from someone who is not a journalist?

We expect middle-schoolers to address "who what where when why and how" when writing stuff. I think we should be able to expect the same from paid journalists whether or not they're professionally trained.

You are correct she is absolutely not a trained journalist.

I hope I can be forgiven for thinking she was considering that the article is under the news section of a website claiming to be a source of journalism.

A small request from those of us more prone to breathing issues than average. Please stop setting large fires like this. The smoke crosses continents and oceans, and many of us miss being able to go outside with starting to cough after an half-hour.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com