For a long time, the experts and engineers Continental are carrying out a “silent” revolution: by 2050, all tires will have to be made with sustainable materials. To date, around 15-20% renewable or recycled materials are already used in a standard Continental passenger car tyre. To further increase the proportion of sustainable materials and conserve valuable resources, Continental constantly analyzes and reviews all the raw materials that can be used in the production of tyres: these include agricultural waste products such as rice husk ash, natural rubber derived from dandelions, recycled rubber or PET bottles.
Continental passenger car tires are made from over one hundred different materials. The combination of these elements affects its performance. The ability to optimize the properties of each component in relation to the others is a highly complex design aspect. Only when the properties of each element interact effectively with all the others are tires safe, high-performance, highly energy efficient and long-lasting. Fillers such as silica are essential to tire manufacturing and help optimize characteristics such as grip, rolling resistance and tire life. In the future, the rice husk will be used as starting material to have a silica produced in a sustainable way. Rice husk is in fact a waste of rice and cannot be used as food or animal feed. The silica derived from the ash in this product is more energy efficient than that obtained from conventional materials such as quartz sand.
In Continental tyres, oils of vegetable origin, such as rapeseed oil and resins deriving from waste materials from the paper and wood industries, already offer an alternative to petroleum-based fillers and impart flexibility to the compounds, improving the grip. Continental only uses oils that meet technical quality standards and are not intended for other consumption. Continental aims to make tire production fully circular by 2050. In addition to the use of renewable materials, the company is systematically implementing the use of recycled raw materials with the aim of ensuring that carbon black, another crucial reinforcing agent in compounds, can be obtained on a large scale in the future.
The Group recently signed an agreement with Pyrum Innovations in order to further optimize the recycling of old tire materials. To do this, Pyrum breaks down old tires through an industrial oven using a special pyrolysis process. In this way, the valuable raw materials contained in end-of-life tires can be extracted and recycled. Both companies are working to obtain quality raw materials from pyrolysis oil with the ultimate goal of establishing a closed loop circular economy process for recycling used tires. In addition to pyrolysis, Continental also makes use of the mechanical processing of end-of-life tyres: rubber, steel and textile fibers are separated through a highly sophisticated process and the rubber is then prepared for reuse, becoming part of new compounds.
The Group has been working for some time to introduce end-of-life tires into the circular economy with the aim of conserving resources and the environment. “Accounts-Reclaim” is a material obtained from the truck tire retreading process at the ContiLifeCycle plant in Stöcken in Hanover since 2013 and has been used in the production of tires by Continental for years. In order to expand the range of applications of recycled rubber and optimize the properties for the various fields of use, Continental has also introduced recycled rubber from other suppliers in addition to “Conti-Reclaim”. Continental is working with partners to get high quality polyester yarn for its tires made from recycled PET bottles. PET bottles often end up in incinerators or landfills but with the ContiRe.Tex technology, Continental has developed an environmentally friendly and more energy-efficient alternative that allows you to reuse 9 to 15 plastic bottles per tyre, depending on size. In this product, recycled PET replaces conventional polyester in carcass structures. The PET bottles used come exclusively from regions without a closed-loop recycling system.
Natural rubber is essential for excellent performance and accounts for 10 to 40% of the total weight of modern high-performance tyres. Continental considers natural rubber a sustainable material only if it comes from responsible sources. The Group adopts an integrated approach aimed at making the complex and fragmented natural rubber supply chains more sustainable: actions such as the use of cutting-edge digital technologies, the involvement of the local population and close collaboration with reliable partners aim to improve transparency and traceability along the entire value chain. With the project Taraxagum, Continental has created a green tire made with dandelion, in which the natural rubber from the rubber tree is replaced with the root of the dandelion plant. In this context, Continental takes an innovative approach to become less and less dependent on natural rubber grown mainly in Southeast Asia and works alongside partners to industrialize the extraction of natural rubber from specially grown dandelion plants.
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