Nowadays 51.97% of waste tires in Bogotá, Colombia are burned or stored. (Alcaldía Bogotá, 2015). Burning tires releases different substances such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, furans, toluene, benzene and lead oxide. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas that increases global warming (IPCC, 2011). Also, the other gases released by burning tires are harmful to human health when inhaled (US Environmental Protection Agency, 1997). On the other hand, storing the wasted tires effects ground uses, for example land that can be used for construction or agriculture is then taken up with wasted tires (US Environmental Protection Agency, 1997). Inappropriate storing conditions have collateral effects such as leading to generations of pests, mice and insects (Herrera Sosa, Martínez Barrera, Barrera Díaz, & Cruz Zaragoza, 2015).
For this reason, in 2012 the municipal government issued the 1457 law for collecting and storing wasted tires. Also, the Mayor of Bogotá pays to a licensed recycler for each wasted tire that is disposed. Nevertheless, the business does not attract the attention of potential investors because there is a problem with financial viability in the recycling companies of Bogotá.
However, the problem of what to do with waste tires is not exclusive to Bogotá nor Colombia. Other places around the world produce a large amount of waste tires every year and many of these places do recycle their tires. We investigated successful business models of tire recyclers in Europe, the United States and Latin America. We concluded that most of these models are economically viable because of one of the following initiatives: 1. Government subsidies, 2. Scale economics 3. Regulations and 4. Strategical alliances.
The idea of this work is to evaluate the feasibility of another initiative: financing tyre recycling companies through donations. In this study, we are particularly interested in characterizing the kind of people or companies that would donate to this initiative.
For individuals, we took a sample of 151 people and we used a descriptive, feeling analysis and logistic regression to discover whether age, monthly income, knowledge of the problem, if the person owns a car and whether the person has donated before, are the main variables to characterize the donators profile and affect whether or not they donate. For organizations, a mathematical process of social network analysis was implemented. To start this analysis, we began by understanding the post-consumption process of wasted tires in Bogotá. Then we conducted a network analysis on the main organization in tire recycling process in Bogota to identify which companies were more likely to donate.
In this research, we concluded that the willingness to donate to recycling tires from both persons and companies is still incipient, but it is possible. We found that the problem with disposing of wasted tires is yet not known by both actors and there are more steps to be taken to solve this problem.
Keywords: Donations, tire recycling, network analysis, regression.
5a. Corporate sustainability and CSR
