Retire your tyres for furniture

How about transforming unsightly trash into attractive and practical furniture for outside or inside your home? This is what one entrepreneur, Wayne Kruger, is doing with creative flair and endless innovation.

Retyre Furniture sources old tyres lying around in the environment, or discarded by tyre concerns and transforms them into chairs, couches, swings and other quirky furniture.

Wayne founded the company in 2011 and has spent the last two years “developing and fine tuning” his art.

Mix of tyre and weave

A mix of tyre and weave has made his furniture popular and his market is expanding. “I now have nine products in the range,” Wayne confirmed. Stock varies from armchairs to stools and from coffee tables to game-board tables.

Kruger shares that over 3000 tyres get changed in South Africa every day! As a country, we are struggling to deal with this vast amount of waste as dump sites no longer accept tyres. Kruger goes around to tyre and car dealerships, offering to remove old tyres. Dealers are more than happy to comply because they do not know what to do with the waste. However, they are also cautious as opportunists have approached them and offered to remove the tyre waste for a fee; and instead of finding a sustainable solution for the tyres, they pocket the money and dump the tyres around the corner.

Retyre Furniture offers a service to “take tyres away for free”. They collect from dealerships, townships and industrial areas. As part of their campaign, they will take before and after shots of a space they have rescued from a tyre dump. The before shot will show the area littered with piles of tyres and the after shot will show the same area displaying Retyre Furniture.

Rethink …Retyre …Relax

Once collected, these tyres are scrubbed free of grit and oil, followed by a rinse. These clean tyres are subsequently drilled in preparation for the final furnishings.

Retyre Furniture makes the environment a priority. Kruger says they operate on this question: “How can we produce something relying as little as possible on electricity?” He has adopted the famous slogan Reduce-Reuse-Recycle and adapted it to add Rethink-Retyre-Relax. He is conscious of the carbon footprint of Retyre Furniture. The tiny granules of tyre waste generated by drilling is minimised and donated for pathway construction.

Retyre Furniture is comfortable and affordable, with the added benefit of being eco. We are all aware of the huge problem of tyres lying around in townships and often getting burnt for heat emitting vast amounts of toxic gases our atmosphere cannot afford. The more we can support such a responsible and creative initiative to deal with a problematic waste product - the better for our environment.

By Soninke Combrinck