Goodyear Introduces Tire With 70% Sustainable Materials
The tire industry is historically incredibly dirty. From the damage that natural rubber plantations have caused, to the toxic toxic emissions from factories, to the incalculable quantity of microplastics and other pollutants that end up in watersources, to the intractable problem of recycling and disposing of used tires, the tire industry has enormous incentive—and pressure—to modernize, decarbonize, and reduce their overall environmental footprint voluntarily, while they still can.
Goodyear has announced a milestone in that process with a demonstration Assurance tire that uses a claimed 70% sustainable materials content. It uses materials including soybean oil to help keep tread pliable; rice husk ash silica as a grip compound; polyester cord fabric made from recycled bottles; bio-based polymers; renewable resins and chemicals; recycled zinc oxide, and strengthening carbon black compounds derived from CO2, methane, and plant-based oils. Many of these are byproducts or waste products from other industrial or farming processes, and the carbon black process reduces carbon output compared to regular manufacturing processes that burn petroleum products. “I’d be curious to know how it impacts the end of life aspect of the tire,” said AutoGuide’s tire expert Jay Condrick. “But anything that can lessen the environmental impact has to be good news.”
The company says that additional research into incorporating natural gas could make the tire carbon neutral, or even carbon negative. “This tire includes materials already in use in Goodyear tires, such as soybean oil, as well as new or soon-to-be-released technologies not yet in production,” a Goodyear spokesperson told us, and their ultimate goal is to produce a tire composed of 100% sustainable materials.
After completing a degree project in automotive design, Dave wrote and photographed for almost a decade in print car magazines (remember those?), before transitioning to digital. He now subjects a series of old high-performance cars to the roads and weather in Vermont and wonders why they're always expensively broken. Please stop when you see him crawling under one on the side of the road.
More by David Traver Adolphus
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I wonder if those compounds effect either microplastics pollution, or microplastics toxicity? It'd be great to create a tire that biodegraded...but of course not too soon.