Rebuilt Tires: Cost & environmental
Many car owners in China are worried when they hear about retread tires, fearing that it is unsafe to drive. But in North America, across the ocean, truck drivers drive retread tires every day and have fun on the highway. Why is there such a big difference?
It turns out that retread tires don't have a good reputation here, and everyone thinks they are "road killers"; but abroad, transportation company bosses regard them as a magic weapon to save money and say that this is a new trend in environmental protection.
Once the bills of North American transportation companies are calculated, the problem becomes clear. A freight boss in Los Angeles counted on his fingers and told us that he has 50 large trucks pulling containers, and he has to change 30 tires every month.
If he buys a brand new one, it will cost $2,200; if he changes to a Bridgestone retread tire, it only costs $1,100. With this calculation, he can save nearly $400,000 a year! This money is enough to hire 6 more drivers. With oil prices rising so sharply, retread tires have become a "life-saving money" for transportation companies. It's no wonder that Bridgestone is in a hurry to expand its retread tire factory. Now the orders for the North American market are scheduled for half a year later.
Why do environmentalists like retread tires? Because they are particularly "green". In the Port of Hamburg, Germany, all container forklifts are using retread tires. Port managers did the math: using 2,000 retread tires a year is equivalent to cutting down 300 fewer trees and saving 20 tons of rubber raw materials.
The EU also has a hard rule that from 2025, vehicles running transport must use retread tires, and the proportion must reach at least 30%, otherwise they will have to pay environmental protection taxes.
Driven by these policies, nearly 4 out of every 10 vehicles in the European market are using retread tires, while the proportion in the Chinese market is only 5%, a gap of almost 9 times.
Technological progress has completely changed the appearance of retread tires. In Michelin's retreading workshop, laser equipment is used to "check" old tires, and even cracks as thin as a hair can be found. When they replace the tire tread, they will operate at a low temperature of minus 15 degrees, so that the tread is particularly firmly attached, and the new tread is stronger than a brand new tire.
The French car test site conducted an experiment, letting retreaded tires and brand new tires run 100,000 kilometers, and finally found that the degree of wear was almost the same, with a difference of only 0.3 mm. Logistics companies that used to look down on retreaded tires are now beginning to recognize them.
The service network of international giants gives customers more peace of mind. In the Australian outback, a truck driver had a flat tire in the middle of the night, and Bridgestone's mobile retreading truck could arrive at the scene within 2 hours, replace the retreaded tire and provide a 12-month warranty.
This "from tire birth to retirement" full life cycle service has greatly increased customer stickiness. In contrast, retreaded tires produced by small domestic workshops have neither testing equipment nor after-sales service, so consumers naturally stay away from them.
The domestic market may only need an opportunity to break the ice. When standardized production standards, strict quality supervision and a complete recycling system are established, maybe one day Chinese drivers will be able to use retread tires to carry goods to distant places like their North American counterparts.
After all, in an era of increasingly scarce resources, making the best use of every tire is the best way to give back to the earth.
