Tyres are made from rubber, steel and textile fibres. The quality of tyres is crucial to traffic safety – and tyre manufacturers thus only use the very best raw materials in their productions.
For decades, tyres were simply left at landfills at the end of their product life – a very unsustainable disposal solution, which is unfortunately still widely used throughout the world. Later, the energy content of end-of-life tyres was recovered through incineration in e.g. cement kilns. This was clearly a step forward in comparison with landfilling, but the good raw materials were destroyed, and only a small fraction of the energy originally invested in the production of a tyre was recovered.
The most sustainable solution is material recycling, where end-of-life tyres are processed into new, high-quality raw materials for the substitution of virgin rubber and steel.