Rethinking the retread

Since when has the tyre had such street cred? Since British designer Julie McDonagh found a niche - albeit in the London fetish scene - turning inner tubes into bags and other accessories. Other people are getting creative too, turning old tyres into products ranging from high fashion industrial ‘ethnic chic’ shoes to practical roof tiles made to look like slate or brick. And Remarkable Recycling has managed to transform 24 tonnes of tyres since January into mouse mats and pencil cases.

Imaginative as they may be, these solutions are a tiny speck compared with the total problem. Tyres might be the bounce in your carpet underlay, tennis court, or even road, if you live in Sussex, where a ‘crumb rubber’ surface has been laid. You’ll see them at go-kart tracks, as boat fenders, as heat-inducing compost heaps, not to mention in Earthships [GF40, p7]. But we’re going to have to come up with even more ideas.

The UK currently scraps around 450,000 tonnes of tyres a year, of which only two-thirds are recovered or recycled. A ban on the disposal of whole waste tyres in hazardous landfill sites came into force in July this year, and all dumping of tyres in landfill must end by 2006, while the government will also be clamping down on their incineration - a practice used because of tyres' high calorific content - from 2008.

So why not rethink the retread? Every retread produced means one less tyre produced. It takes seven gallons of oil to make a new tyre, but only two and a half to do up a part-worn. The truck and aviation industries need no convincing that they’re as good as new, although car drivers are still to be persuaded to make theirs a retread at the garage. Although you can’t get your own tyres redone as you might your shoes resoled, you can make sure the 17 tyres that your car will get through in its lifetime are in good enough nick to be sent off to the retreaders when you’ve finished with them. So if you don’t fancy the fetish scene, driving carefully is just as good a way to reduce the tyre mountain. - Hannah Bullock

12 October 2003

Hannah Bullock