There are some companies that help recycle the old tires: Many of the solutions involve breaking down the tires to create consumer products. In Kuwait, one company in particular is helping out: the EPSCO Global General Trading recycling company claims to be able to recycle up to 3 million tires per year — which sounds great until one realizes that it would take over 14 years to recycle all the tires and that’s not including the amount of waste tires created during that time.

Product Recovery Technology International (PRTI) was founded in 2013 to try to solve the global problem of waste tires. The company came up with a patented Thermal DeManufacturing process that gets rid of waste tires by transforming them into valuable sources of energy and steel.

The process uses 30-foot tall vertical cylinders that heats the tires up enough to turn the materials into a gas. PRTI collects the gas, condenses it and turns it into oil. The whole demanufacturing process takes 11 hours and results in solid fuel, oil, gas and steel.

“Every road tire that is thrown away has the energy of almost three gallons of oil. The way we look at a tire is that it's a round battery.” Through their demanufacturing process, the company is able to harness the stored energy in these “round batteries” and utilize it by creating a microgrid with 8 to 10 MW per site. With the counsel of their former CEO, Jason Williams, PRTI built a small datacenter to mine bitcoin using the energy produced from the waste tires.

So far, PRTI has processed 50 million pounds of tires, which is about two million tires.

This company is solving a decades-old environmental problem, creating a source of energy in the process, then using that energy to mine bitcoin. This shreds the mainstream media narrative on Bitcoin being a net negative for the environment.