FROM CARBON TO CAPITAL

'WE WANT TO EDUCATE PEOPLE ABOUT TYRES AND TELL THEM TO STOP BURNING TYRES

THE trio of young men gazed at the mountain of discarded tyres - an eyesore and an environmental hazard to most people, but to them it was an opportunity to flex their entrepreneurial muscle.

Mzokhona Maxase (now 27), Tshepo Sithole (28) and Fortune Hadebe (27) were students at the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) in Pretoria, but they were unable to attend classes due to protests at the university. So, they went for a walk and paused outside Carbon Klean, a tyre recycling facility in Pretoria West.

"We went inside and the foreman showed us how they recycled tyres," Mzokhona recalls. "He told us their biggest challenge was what to do with the waste in the form of carbon char, the residual solid that remains after oil and steel has been removed from recycled tyres. And even though we weren't science students, we'd already decided we wanted to play in the green economy space."

The young men asked for a sample of the carbon char so they could study it and a year later, their eco-friendly business, Cubic 38, was born.

The company's name is derived from an equation for compressed natural gas, a cleaner alternative to diesel and petrol, and it uses the char as the main ingredient in shoe polish and tyre polish.

"Tyres aren't waste, they're a resource - if you know how to use them properly," Mzokhona explains.

When he moved to Gauteng from Hluhluwe in rural KwaZulu-Natal, Mzokhona was shocked at the amount of waste he encountered.

"Valuable materials which could be upcycled into income-generating raw materials were labelled as waste materials. It opened my eyes to the reality, and I told myself I want to be involved in the growing market of the green space." He explains that carbon char, also