India: Woman Turns Tyres into Children’s Playgrounds

What does one do with old rubber tyres? In Bengaluru, India, a woman has upcycled them into the most unlikely items: colourful playground equipment.

Pooja Rai is the founder and CEO of Anthill Creations, a non-profit organisation which makes sustainable play-spaces for children by using tyres, of which 100 million is discarded each year in the southeast Asian country.

With the help of volunteers, these tyres are collected, carefully cleaned, painted and sculpted into all sorts of kid-friendly designs: these range from animals, tunnels and cars, to swings, seesaws and jungle gyms.

Since 2016, over 275 schools, public spaces and refugee camps have benefitted from Anthill’s tyre-made creations.

The process to make a small play-place costs around $800, while a large one requires four times that amount. The organisation relies on donations from the public to make these spaces a reality for children.

And indeed, Anthill shows no sign of stopping in their endeavours.

Rai says: “We often forget how vulnerable these growing years can be. The right to play should be considered critical to a child’s cognitive growth, physical and emotional well-being – we believe that it is indeed a basic human right.”

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