Bhubaneswar: Step inside Odisha’s Industrial Training Institute (ITI) Berhampur and you can feel that no scrap can be labelled as waste. About 100 students of the skill development institute are busy constructing the first tyre park of the eastern Indian state, covering over 4,000 square metres on the campus premises.
The Park will feature sculptures as high as 2 to 30 feet, made out of worn out and discarded tyres.
“Damaged tyres can’t be recycled. They are mostly burnt. This contributes to air pollution. Moreover, often rainwater accumulates in these abandoned tyres and turns into breeding grounds for mosquitoes carrying dengue-causing pathogens,” said the principal of the institute, Rajat Panigrahi.
Realising this, the institute decided to encourage its students to build a park of tyres.
“We have built tyre sculptures of two elephants and a horse. We are making more sculptures of dinosaurs and crows. So far, we have used about 700 damaged tyres for these sculptures. For the entire project, we plan to utilise at least 3,000 such tyres,” said Santosh Swain, a student of the institute.
It took the team around 10 days to make three sculptures from the damaged tyres donated by Berhampur Municipal Corporation (BMC) and RTO. The students also visited junkyards to gather the materials. The institute plans to throw the park open to people by the first week of January.
For making the sculptures, the students adopted a special technique called rapping for shaping up the tyres as per requirement. “First we transform the smaller A4 size drawing into a bigger one. With the help of the 2D drawing, the inner metal framework is made by welding scrap metals,” added Panigrahi.
Earlier, the students of the institute had also made sculptures using e-waste and waste grass.
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