Tire companies producing plant-based tires

From The Plain Dealer: 

Cleveland -- By 2020, Bridgestone wants to sell tires made from plants, without using oil or coal. By 2050, the company wants that to be all its customers are buying. 

In a presentation at the International Tire Exhibition and Conference in Akron, Ohio, last week, a Bridgestone chemical engineer laid out the company's goal to use 100 percent sustainable material in its tires. 

Another company, Cooper Tire, is working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a biomass research firm to develop its own alternatives. 

"We are moving at warp speed," said Michael Fraley, CEO of PanAridus, an agricultural research company partnering with Cooper to develop sustainable alternatives. The company wants to begin commercial production of sustainable tires by 2020, engineer Yingyi Huang said during her presentation to tire industry executives. 

Huang showed a prototype tire made of 100 percent sustainable components that exhibited superior durability to its current production tires; 100 percent sustainable means the tire contains no extracted resources such as coal and oil derivatives.

It involves not only switching away from rainforest rubber plantations that provide the natural components in rubber, but also moving away from oil and petroleum that provides the carbon used in its synthetic rubber and other chemical materials.

Goodyear is not performing research on guayule or TKS, but the company has worked to develop synthetic rubbers from biomass ingredients. Biomass means living or recently living plants, as opposed to the centuries-dead biological material that makes up coal and oil.

To read the full article, visit cleveland.com.