We Have a Serious Tire Problem

Driving a vehicle on the road requires several items and some of them are consumable. Those consumables in your vehicle include the gas, fluids, brake pads, filters, wiper blades, and tires. The tires, because they are what make direct contact with the road, are the items that we try to pay close attention to. These are the largest of the consumable items and if you were to use your ties until they were gone you’d be putting yourself and others in danger on the road. The problem is, we don’t have a great way to dispose of or recycle these tires just yet.

Studying Tires

One of the companies that spend a lot of money to study how to create a more sustainable tire is Michelin. They spend more than $800 million every year on this research and have looked at ways to create tires from wood, straw, beets, and even printable airless materials for the future. The reason they do this is the fact that in the US alone, we produce 246 million waste tires every year and we’re running out of places to put all these tires that are replaced on the vehicles we drive.

Not a Simply Recycling Program

The items that are included in a tire aren’t always easy to recycle and can be somewhat harmful to the environment. The makeup of most tires includes:

• 19% natural rubber
• 38% synthetic rubber
• 4 % synthetic-polymer fabric belts
• 12% wire
• 26% fillers

With the number of different items that make up the tires we ride on every day, it easy to see how it could be difficult to separate the items to have them properly recycled. The amount of annual waste is certainly a good reason for Michelin and other tire brands to continue to study sustainability possibilities for the future.

The Dead Tires Go to Different Industries

Every tire that’s no longer usable can be used in something else. Unfortunately, most of these tires are used in dirty and harmful areas that have residual effects on the environment. Right now, the tires that are disposed of end up in the following locations:

• 26% are ground into filler for asphalt and insulation
• 11% are dumped into landfills, those left in the landfill will take hundreds of years to decompose
• 7% are blended into roadbeds, barriers, retaining walls, and used for other projects
• 7 % are recycled to playground and sports field surfaces or used as tire swings
• 49% are burned for fuel. Tire rubber has more energy than coal but it burns dirty and can be harmful to the environment

The Future of Tires

Programs that work toward learning more about how to recycle tires, create cleaner tires, and even create tires that will decompose faster are important to the future of the environment. With the help of the tire manufacturers, we can hope that the future will lead us to fewer tires being disposed of or burned as fuel, but it’s going to take some serious advancements to make that a reality.