Eco-Friendly Tires
Source: https://www.tirereview.com/157213/
Author: Rich Ashley
Tiremakers stress their commitment to continuous improvement in environmental management. They proclaim their determination to actively contribute to the protection of the environment and address the concerns of the public. Manufacturers are anxious to point out how they’ve organized their efforts around pollution prevention, compliance with legislation and environmental regulations, and continuing improvement of the environmental performance of their manufacturing operations. One of their first steps was to analyze the total lifetime environmental impact of tires to help determine how it might be improved. What researchers found was that rolling resistance contributes the most to greenhouse gas emissions (in excess of 85%) because of the amount of extra fuel that tires cause engines to burn. Every additional gallon of oil that is burned to overcome rolling resistance adds 18 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Initial efforts to develop low rolling resistance tires yielded improvements of about 5% in rotating friction, which boosted fuel economy by as much as 4% to 8%. Over the lifetime of a passenger tire, this resulted in savings of 10 to 80 gallons of gasoline.