Bridgestone Develops Tire Using 75% Recycled and Renewable Materials
Bridgestone Americas announced it has produced a run of demonstration tires created with 75% recycled and renewable resources, such as synthetic rubber produced with recycled plastics and natural rubber harvested from desert shrubs grown domestically, in the Arizona desert.
The business has concluded creation of 200 demonstration tires and is pursuing joint analysis with automakers for use on the subsequent era of electrified SUVs and crossovers (CUVs).
The firm’s relentless commitment to its goal of using 100% sustainable resources in its goods by 2050 was underscored in remarks by Bridgestone Worldwide CEO, Shuichi Ishibashi, in the course of a February 16 briefing with media and sector analysts in Tokyo where Bridgestone also introduced that it is pursuing a tire design and style making use of 90% recycled and renewable elements for passenger vehicles.
Built and engineered at Bridgestone’s Americas Engineering Center in Akron, Ohio, the new tires had been developed at the company’s Aiken County Passenger/Light Truck Radial Tire Plant in Graniteville, South Carolina.
The Aiken plant is the 1st tire manufacturing facility in The us to generate Worldwide Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC) Additionally certification for transparency and traceability of sustainable uncooked products including bio, bio-round and circular-dependent substance. Aiken also operates an on-web site, 8-acre solar array that supplies renewable energy to assist in powering the plant’s manufacturing operations.
75% Recycled and Renewable Elements
The tires contain a multitude of products derived from recycled and biobased feedstocks. These include things like recycled monomer, produced with recycled components such as plastic bottles, to generate the synthetic rubber in the tire1 as properly as recycled metal, recycled carbon black, TPO-derived carbon black and bio-based carbon black. Multiple supplies are ISCC Moreover certified.
The new tire is the 1st road tire to utilize purely natural rubber derived from the guayule desert shrub cultivated at Bridgestone’s guayule R&D agricultural facility in Eloy, Arizona. Bridgestone has invested a lot more than 10 many years and over $100 million on the exploration and growth of guayule as an option to imported pure rubber from the Hevea Brasiliensis tree developed predominantly in Southeast Asia.
Guayule can serve as an alternative to current crops, these kinds of as alfalfa and cotton, in America’s drought-stricken desert southwest, necessitating as minor as fifty percent the drinking water to cultivate.
Guayule is portion of Bridgestone’s prepare to attain carbon neutrality and make tires from 100% sustainable elements by 2050. The firm is concentrating on business creation of guayule-derived pure rubber by the conclude of the ten years.