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In 2022, tire firm Bridgestone used the IndyCar racing collection to debut a brand new sustainable pure rubber that it has been testing as a substitute for much less environmentally pleasant rubber. The brand new tires used rubber from a desert shrub known as guayule (Parthenium argentatum). Now, Bridgestone is able to strive the rubber in a extra sensible software and has produced an indication run of road-going tires utilizing guayule rubber and a excessive proportion of recycled supplies. The corporate will conduct exams with automakers to show the idea.
The world produces about 2 billion tires annually, and whereas artificial rubbers are utilized in modest quantities, most street tires use a whole lot of pure rubber from the para rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis). However 90 % of para rubber is grown in Southeast Asia and needs to be shipped world wide to succeed in tire factories.
Bridgestone has been taking a look at guayule as a substitute for a little bit over a decade now. The guayule plant is a brief, woody shrub that grows simply within the deserts of the American Southwest and requires a lot much less water than crops like alfalfa or cotton which are additionally grown there. In Arizona, Bridgestone has been breeding guayule and conducting analysis and improvement on its use in tire-making.
Extra than simply pure rubber
Actually, these new tires incorporate extra than simply guayule rubber. Bridgestone says that 38 % of the tire’s content material is organic in origin—there’s some para and guayule rubber, but in addition plant-based oils and resins, biologically derived silica from rice husk ash, and biologically derived carbon black.
One other 37 % of the tire’s content material is from recycled supplies. These embody recycled metal (for the tire’s belt), recycled rubber chemical compounds, carbon black from each recycled sources and end-of-life tire pyrolysis oil, and artificial rubber produced from sustainable supplies like recycled plastic bottles.
“As we progress in our transformation to a sustainable options firm, we’re making unimaginable progress in the usage of recycled and renewable supplies to convey sustainable tire expertise from the drafting board to the driveway,” mentioned Paolo Ferrari, president and CEO of Bridgestone Americas. “The manufacturing and deployment of a 75-percent recycled and renewable supplies tire expertise marks a major milestone as we speed up our progress towards utilizing absolutely sustainable supplies in our merchandise by 2050.”
Bridgestone produced a run of 200 demonstration tires at its Aiken County Passenger/Gentle Truck Radial Tire Plant in Graniteville, South Carolina, which is the primary US tire manufacturing unit to earn an Worldwide Sustainability and Carbon Certification for its transparency and traceability of sustainable uncooked supplies. The plant additionally makes use of an eight-acre photo voltaic array to assist energy its operations—tire manufacturing is a really energy-intensive course of.
Now the tire firm will conduct joint evaluations with automakers to check these tires’ suitability for future EVs, and it hopes the great sturdiness of guayule rubber will probably be well-suited to that software.
