SRI’s CEO, Gopi Sekhar was recently interviewed by Karamjit Singh of The Edge, a financial and investment weekly publication here in Malaysia. The following is an excerpt.
One of the biggest environmental problems plaguing the world is the estimated one billion tyres lying in dumps around the world. The tyres cannot be easily disposed of or recycled and lie in massive dumps — some up to six football fields deep — leaking chemicals into the ground. Some catch fire spectacularly. These fires do not burn out easily. YouTube has videos showing tyre dumps on fire, spewing out thick black smoke and flames. The fires will last for days, the smoke for years. One tyre dumpsite was simmering deep in its bowels, releasing smoke for five incredible years.
“It is a common occurrence,” says Gopi Sekhar, CEO of SRI, who nonetheless believes he has found the solution to the rising mountains of discarded tyres around the world. He and his research team have created a compound which goes into making retread tires. More importantly, a light tyre for trucks, which was made with more than 14% recycled rubber, has been independently validated and tested by the Rubber Research Institute (RRI) of the Malaysian Rubber Board. The RRI noted that the performance of the tyre made by SRI was even better than that of a tyre made of virgin rubber.
An ecstatic Gopi welcomes the RRI validation. “What we have here is nothing less than the solution to the global tyre and rubber scrap problem. It will address not only the annual accumulation [of tyres] but also the backlog in the landfills. The introduction of SRI Compound Masterbatch as an industrial raw material effectively means cost-effective value-added consumption, which will make it irresistible as a green raw material. We believe that this is the future of global rubber recycling,” he says.
The rest of the article can be read at The Edge
