From specially bred dandelions to using recycled tyres in Timberland footwear, the industry is working to take pressure off the environment

The life of a tyre begins with the rubber tree in south-east Asia, which produces around 90% of the world’s natural rubber supply. The tyre industry consumes around 70% of all natural rubber grown because it offers performance qualities, such as resistance and load-bearing capability, unmatched by synthetic alternatives.

Increasing car ownership in countries such as India and China is driving up demand for rubber. To meet this, recent research estimates rubber plantations in south-east Asia will have to expand by 8.5m hectares by 2024, with potentially “catastrophic” consequences for forests, primates and endangered birds.

The industry also faces supply chain risks. The reason that rubber production is so heavily concentrated in Asia is because commercial cultivation in South America is restricted by a fungal disease.



Dandelions: an alternative source of rubber?



To reduce dependency on the south-east Asian rubber trees, the search is on for alternatives. Research project Drive4EU is looking to the Russian dandelion.

Indigenous to the high plateau of south-east Kazakhstan, and the adjacent areas of China and Kyrgyzstan, the Russian dandelion produces a high quality of natural rubber and was used by the Soviet Union during the second world war to produce army vehicle tyres.

Map of Kazakhstan, China and Kyrgyzstan Russian dandelions are indigenous to south-east Kazakhstan and nearby areas of China and Kyrgyzstan.

Though its use in tyres is proven, research is still required around breeding, cultivation and extraction to scale up production. Drive4EU, now two years into the four-year project, has plots of Russian dandelions growing in Belgium, the Netherlands and Kazakhstan and is making progress in breeding for higher yields, improving cultivation and harvesting, and scaling up extraction.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rubber can be harvested from the roots of Russian dandelions. Photograph: Wageningen University and Research Centre

“When you look at wheat, it used to be like grass, with very tiny kernels on it, but by breeding we could improve its form and make really big kernels that are the grain that we eat today. And that’s what we’re trying to do here – take a wild plant species and make a crop out of it,” says van der Meer.

The goal is to harvest 1,000kg of dandelion rubber per hectare per year, which compares with the 1,5000-2,000 per hectare a year that a seven-year-old rubber tree plantation typically produces.



If the agronomy can be cracked, crops could be cultivated in Europe, closer to the production sites of tyre manufacturers. This is one of the benefits for tyre manufacturer Continental, which has been working on dandelion rubber for a number of years and presented its first test tyres in October 2014.

Making new rubber from old rubber

Grappling with supply chain issues is just one of the tyre industry’s challenges; dealing with waste is another. When a tyre is no longer roadworthy you’re left with highly flammable waste that can’t biodegrade. Tyres are also perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes carrying deadly diseases such as dengue fever.



Rather than simply sending tyres to landfill (which is banned in the UK under the EU landfill directive), more inventive ways of handling tyre waste are emerging. Rubber from end-of-life tyres is being turned into rubber “crumb” and incorporated into new materials such as running track paving, weightlifting plates and acoustic barriers.

Green materials company Lehigh Technologies is approaching the problem with a chemicals mindset. The US company buys shredded tyres from waste recyclers and, using its turbo mill technology, turns it into micronized rubber powder (MRP) that’s the consistency of flour and smaller than a human hair in diameter. It then sells this as an additive to go back into new tyres (making up 5%-7% of all the rubber in new tyres), reducing raw material costs.

Micronized rubber powder. Photograph: Lehigh Technologies

“If you’ve made a molecule once already, why do you have to keep on making it? Why can’t you use it over and over again? The reason is, it’s very hard to do that. Once you’ve turned all those molecules into a table, for example, how do you de-construct it and bring it back into a form that can be reused? That’s what we’re doing for rubber,” explains Lehigh’s chief executive, Alan Barton.

The small venture-capital-backed company has built the world’s largest MRP plant in Atlanta and plans to build a smaller European plant near Barcelona. It currently supplies six of the top 10 tyre manufacturers with MRP, and says 350m tyres have been made using it to date.



Rubber shoes

In an effort to prevent its tyres from piling up as waste, manufacturer and distributor Omni United headquartered in Singapore has teamed up with fashion brand Timberland to design and manufacture a tyre that can be recycled into Timberland shoes.

“When you sell a product, it’s absolutely your responsibility to take that product back and do something with it once it’s done its shelf life if it’s not biodegradable,” says Omni United’s chief executive, Gajendra Singh Sareen.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Timberland Tires and footwear. Photograph: Omni United/Timberland

Timberland Tires are produced and sold in the US. Positioned at the premium end of the market, they compete with Michelin, Bridgestone and Goodyear. These tyres will be collected and sorted by Liberty Tire Recycling, and the first shoes to incorporate the recycled rubber are expected to be available in 2017.

“We make lots of shoes, and therefore we use lots of rubber,” explains Timberland’s president Stewart Whitney. “For some time now, we have been seeking a consistent source of recycled tyre rubber that meets our stringent quality and environmental standards.”

Given tyres are essentially “a rolling billboard”, Sareen is surprised a collaboration between the fashion and tyre industries has taken so long. In leveraging a household name like Timberland, he wants to raise awareness around tyre waste and set a trend. He also hopes the initiative will give Omni United a marketing edge over its competitors.

Timberland makes a lot of shoes but with the global tyre industry predicted to reach 2.9bn units by 2017, the initiative isn’t a large-scale solution to waste. However, these are the first baby steps towards making the tyre industry more sustainable.

