Millions of used tyres in Mexico are being recycled in an ingenious way!

Every year more vehicles make it onto Mexico\'s roads, generating a whole lot of pollution. But the polluting doesn\'t stop there. Every year, a large number of these vehicles run so much that they wear out their tyres.

Mexico alone generates around 25 million used tires per year. Around 10 million used tires are found in dumps near cities on the Mexico-U.S. border. A large number of these are actually from Uncle Sam. Regardless, they fill Mexican garbage dumps.

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Burning them is not an option and decomposition takes between 5 to 8 decades. So what then are the people living near these dumps to do? Get buried under the endless deluge of worn and discarded tyres? Luckily, man\'s ingenuity has found a way to overcome this.

Tijuana neighbourhoods have embraced the problem by finding alternate methods of recycling the tyres.

The locals here have been using tyres, attaching them to the surfaces of hilly areas of their villages. This avoids landslides and the heavy tyres provide support to the surface.

Makeshift stairs have been created in hilly areas of the neighbourhoods. Wooden homes have been secured with used tyres. Foundations have also been created with used tyres. What was once set to bury them, now helps to, quite literally, support them.

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In 2004, the largest dump site sat in Ciudad Juárez, where nearly 5 million tires collected in towering piles on a patch of desert in the city\'s outskirts. Thanks to recycling, after more than a decade the site now holds less than a million tires. Not just this, the recycling efforts are helping to reduce health and safety risks posed by tyre dumps located in these border cities.