Page 56 - TBN-2022-2
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3R and its Role in the Future of the Tyre Industry
Michael Hutt
General Manager -Marketing & Business Development, Kit Loong Commercial Tyre Group
The replacement tyre industry in Malaysia is huge. A 2019 re- port, plus the experience of Kit Loong (commercial and passenger car divisions), suggests it is worth 8+ million pieces of PCR replacement tyres per year (10-11 million if you include OEM), 2-2.4 million pieces of new truck tyres and 1 million light truck tyres, plus 1.2 million retreads, - torcycle tyres (2 million per year in to- tal with OEM).
Which is, quite frankly, a staggering amount.
The question being asked more and more is: ‘what happens to these tyres af- ter they’ve reached the end of their life?’
But the actual question we should be asking is: ‘what are we doing to re- duce the number of tyres we need to
Once we reframe the question, there are a lot more factors we can bring
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into play that can assist in reducing our overall consumption and therefore the overall amount of waste. We call these 3R: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Some organisations and professional bodies have actually extrapolated as far as 8Rs, but let’s start with three!
First, why?
Recycling is the end of the process. However, in terms of sustainability and total product life cycle cost, it actually only performs a small part of the pro- cess and creates very little additional value from a product if implemented alone without broader tactics.
Think about using a product once, and then recycling it. Every time you do this, the amount of energy and natu- ral resources used to create the initial product is the same. Recycling usual- ly entails breaking down the tyre into component parts, very little of which is used to create a second ‘new’ tyre, and most tyre recycling goes to burn- ing for the likes of the cement industry.
