Sustainable Tyre- A Journey to Meet Future Requirements of Tyre Industry

Sustainability and environmentally friendly business practices are becoming essential. Tyre industries are embracing the green initiatives to reduce its impact on the environment by exploring the eco-friendly strategies. Starting from the ethical raw material sourcing to a creative recycling technique, strategies are widely distributing in every step of tyre manufacturing to disposition. Each stage of a tyre's life cycle viz. raw material procurement, manufacturing, transportation both upstream and downstream as well as during the end-of-life phases have an emission-saving potential. It is important to reduce emissions at every stage of tyre's lifecycle. We, JK Tyre has recently developed a Sustainable Tyre with 11% less GHG emission through sustainable raw material approach. Bio sourced or bio attributed raw materials like Styrene Butadiene Rubber (SBR), Polybutadiene Rubber (PBR), Rubber process oil (RPO) and Silica along with natural rubber (NR) had been used. Beside the raw materials from bio source, raw materials obtained from end-of-life tire and waste plastic bottles are also used, to manufacture the sustainable tyre. Being a safety item, developed tyres had gone through different testing process to evaluate the performance. Indoor evaluation viz. RRC, endurance, noise & vibration as well as field evaluation exhibits that the tyre made from sustainable materials are ready to roll on the road. In this paper, the journey starting from selection of raw materials to the placing the tyre in the market with indoor and outdoor validation have been summarised.