Follow me	Joe Laur
	by Joe Laur

“Treading” Lightly on the Planet: Remolding and Reusing Old Tires

Every Green Diamond Tire on the road means one less tire is sent to clog a landfill and 3-7 gallons of oil are saved for each typical passenger vehicle tire.

Tires are a huge waste issue. Waste tires are toxic when they burn, foster rodents and mosquitoes inside them, take up lots of space and last forever in landfills. Back in the early 1990’s in the US alone, about 3 billion old tires were stockpiled in the US with over 180 million added each year. Over 75% of waste tires each year were landfilled, stockpiled or illegally dumped. Big problem.

©Tomo.Yun (www.yunphoto.net/en/)

Now nearly every state has scrap tire laws, and 34 smarter states provide market incentives to handle waste tires. As a result, 60% of waste tires have been recycled and the stockpiles reduced to about 500 million tires. And the synthetic rubber in tires is derived from petroleum that we paid good money - and sometimes blood - for. Doesn’t it make sense to find as many ways as possible to reuse them?

Photo: City of Berkleley

Well, leave it to a bunch of folks living on an island to be ahead of the curve. I’m talking about Iceland here. Icy winters, hills and curves, and when you are on an island, you are much more aware that there is no “away”.

Those hardy innovative Icelanders came up with a nifty process that not only uses an old tire to make a new one, but makes a better tire in the process. Green Diamond Tires are an Icelandic invention, now made here in the US of A. The Green Diamond Tire is an ingenious and technologically sophisticated remolded tire, with thousands of diamond-hard silicium carbide granules embedded evenly throughout the tire's tread.

Oooooh, shiny!

Here’s how it works. As the tread wears and the old granules fall off, new granules appear at the tread surface to grip the road. Kind of like those soaps with the nut shells or whatever they are mixed in to scrape the druck off your face. The result is a tire that performs well is the harsh Icelandic winters and keeps one more tire out of the waste heap.

Now my colleagues in Houston and LA don’t have to worry about this much, but the Greenopolis team members up here in New England, where the women are strong and the men are frostbitten, have to navigate in conditions a lot like Iceland. In fact we’re thinking of seceding and becoming part of Iceland; we get hot springs and they get maple syrup.

Industrious tire guys at work remolding old tires into new ones with sharp granules.

Now, these are not your father’s retreads that peeled off on the highway on a hot summer’s day. This state of the art tire remolding technology is used to produce a product that matches the quality and appearance of a 'major' manufacturer's tire, and according to independent testing (done by Swedes, who can be pretty independent) out-performs that tire in steering and braking on slippery surfaces. This is pretty cool - not only reused, but made better, like the 6 Million Dollar Man. Every Green Diamond Tire on the road means one less tire is sent to clog a landfill and 3-7 gallons of oil are saved for each typical passenger vehicle tire. The Green Diamond Tire is a great example of a recycled, remanufactured product that is actually superior to the original product from which it is made. Waste to resources indeed.

And the Green Diamond Tires are easier on the roads and your ears than studded tires. Those thousands of small sharp-edged granules embedded in the tire give them great traction without the hammering and damaging effect of studs. That’s tire studs, not guys like me.

For other reuses of tires here on Greenopolis, take a look at Super E-Spec rubber tires for warmer places, tire products for the home, phone cases, tire swings, and tire condoms - oops sorry, haven’t written that one yet, still doing the research. But if you live in an icy clime, check out Green Diamond tires, and tread lightly on the planet.