As of 2022, Continental will be able to employ reprocessed polyester made from recycled plastic bottles in their tyre manufacture. The new sustainable polyester yarn will be produced mechanically from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles and used in the tyre carcass assembly. This material can totally replace polyester. The premium tyre manufacturer has developed a special technology to recycle PET bottles without the need for previously necessary intermediate chemical steps, and to make the polyester yarn functional for the tire's high mechanical requirements, in collaboration with its cooperation partner and supplier OTIZ, a fibre specialist and textile manufacturer.
"As early as 2022, we will be able to use material obtained from recycled PET bottles in tire production. In our innovative recycling process, the fibres are spun from recycled PET without having to break the material down into its components beforehand," says Dr. Andreas Topp, responsible for materials, process development and industrialization in Continental’s Tyre business area. He adds: "Already at this year's IAA MOBILITY in Munich, we will present a highly innovative concept tire with polyester yarn made from recycled PET bottles. With the use of recycled polyester yarn, we are taking another important step in the direction of the cross-product circular economy."
As for the recycling process, Bottles are sorted, caps are removed, and the bottles are then mechanically cleaned as part of the recycling process. They are melted down and granulated after mechanical shredding, followed by solid-state polymerization and a modified spinning process.
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"Our modified manufacturing process enables us to obtain polyester yarn for tire construction from PET bottles without any polymerization process from monomers," explains Dr. Derren Huang, Chief of Research and Development at OTIZ.
Continental's laboratory and tyre tests have proved that secondary raw material fibres work just as well as the fibres used previously. They have the same quality as virgin PET, are just as stable, and are especially well-suited for tyres because of their breaking strength, toughness, and thermal stability.
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Conventional PET has long been used in automobile tyre manufacture because it maintains its shape even when subjected to high loads and temperatures, ensuring safety at all speeds. The use of recycled PET in tyre manufacturing saves precious resources: a typical passenger car tyre contains roughly 400 grammes of polyester yarn. This indicates that in the future, more than 60 recycled PET bottles might be utilised to make a full set of automobile tyres.
What do you think of Continental using recycled PET plastic bottles in tyre production?
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