How does TIP contribute to improve global end-of-life tire (ELT) management?
TIP acts by collecting and disseminating ELT-management data, and by engaging with ELT-value-chain stakeholders toward a shared understanding of the challenges and potential solutions for improved ELT management.
In 2021 we published Sustainability Driven: Accelerating Impact with the Tire Sector SDG Roadmap. The Roadmap offers a framework for action that outlines impactful pathways for the entire sector to contribute to the ambitions of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As part of this framework, the tire industry has plotted pathways toward sustainable ELT management.
The Roadmap underlines the importance of a systematic life cycle approach to achieve a circular economy, which can result in better environmental performance and improved security of supply of raw materials, and tire companies are exploring beneficial uses for ELT and emerging technologies to recover raw materials from ELT.
The Roadmap identifies relevant actions for collective or individual-company action, including:
- Developing standards to assess life cycle impacts of critical materials for use by companies
- Developing solutions to track and trace the flow of ELTs
- Fostering new or improved ELT markets, management systems and recycling technologies that advance circularity
- Identifying barriers, developing tools, exchanging practices, improving access to information and monitor progress on ELT collection and recycling – and using this information to engage stakeholders to promote circularity
- Developing a standardized definition and methodology for circularity to allow improved tracking and understanding of individual company circularity performance
- Promoting innovation and eco-design principles to underpin individual company efforts across value chains to extend tire life, promote sustainable outcomes and transform end-of-life management options
- Establishing cross-sectoral engagement that supports and enables individual companies and their value chains to advance circularity and the development of alternative materials to reduce potential impacts on human health or the environment
Consistent with the opportunities identified by the Roadmap, a series of regional ELT-value-chain workshops (in Europe, the US, and China) – organized in collaboration with regional tire trade associations – resulted in recommendations to mobilize stakeholders toward new, more effective and scaled management systems; and, to leverage existing circularity metrics to guide improvements in ELT management.
TIP continues to be active in these areas and is developing standardized definitions and methodologies tailored for the tire industry that will contribute to allow tire manufacturers to better understand and improve their circularity performance. TIP will also launch an online stakeholder-driven platform that will have the objective of centralizing and sharing ELT-management data and knowhow to inform sustainable ELT-management practices.
Additionally, and benefiting from TIP’s global research on ELT, TIP published an ELT-management toolkit that lays out key steps for establishing and enhancing ELT management, whilst underlining the social, economic and environmental benefits of systems that work well. TIP works with regional tire value-value chain stakeholders to raise global awareness of the toolkit.
