Healthy Swellness: Rethink Tires this year as you resolve to get fit!
As someone who hasn’t owned a car for quite a while, I must admit I haven’t given much thought as to what happens to used car tires when they are thrown away. When it was brought to my attention that just disposing of them means that thousands of tires are just ending up in landfills, it was scary to think about. I feel I’m pretty aware of how much garbage I create in terms of packaging, clothing and the like, but tires, that’s a significant level of waste, to put it mildly.
Knowing this, I was happy to learn about the good work of Ontario Tire Stewardship; since 2009, their Used Tires Program has diverted close to 100 million tires from landfills! How does it work? Well, when you have old tires to get rid of, rather than dropping them at the dump or tossing them with the trash, you bring them to a registered collector and they’ll have your tires hauled so they can be responsibly recycled into new products.
I didn’t realize that tires can be made into other useful items, such as surfacing for playgrounds and flooring for gyms – which you know speaks to me! I had the opportunity to test out recycled rubber flooring in a gym I worked out in recently. The flooring is super soft underfoot and provides a lot of cushioning, it’s easy to keep clean, and it’s slip resistant.
And that cushioning is great not only for any high impact exercises you may do, but also, say, if you drop a heavy dumbbell (which my weak arms have been very close to doing more than once) It’s also a budget-friendly option, so I’d definitely want this in my home gym, if I were to have the space at home.
With winter here (and perhaps you’ve made some fitness New Year’s resolutions), you may be wanting to do more of your workouts indoors. Consider looking into the repurposed rubber flooring option and remember, you typically don’t need much space to get in a good workout. So carving out a corner where you can get Zen or do some strength training using your own body weight won’t call for much flooring.
Many of the other ways the tires are repurposed are for the outdoors such as rubber landscape tiles and rubber mulch, which I didn’t even know existed but plan to try in my potted plants in the nicer weather. It can also be used for landscaping bricks, paving, planters and roofing shakes – something to keep in mind for spring when you decide to do some renos or updates. I’m also thinking these tiles would be an easy way for me to spruce up my downtown balcony floor, which I’ve left as the builder made it: plain and grey. A soft rubber flooring would be much more inviting.
So enough daydreaming about the nice weather… and back to the resolutions. In addition to hitting the gym in 2017, remember to Rethink Tires and ways that repurposed tire products can be used in your life. You’ll be doing the planet some good, which is a great way to make 2017 even better than last year.
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Leave a Comment January 4, 2017