Michelin India shares information on how it plans to increase use of tyres in an eco friendly manner

Michelin India shares information on how it plans to increase use of tyres in an eco-friendly manner across India 

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Michelin India shares information on how it plans to increase use of tyres in an eco friendly manner
Michelin Knowledge Series

Date: 6th August 2014

Venue: Taj Mahal Hotel, New Delhi

Name of Event: Michelin Knowledge Series

Description:

Continuing its initiative of educating customers about their commitment towards service, Michelin India organised a conference of the media with Mr. Dominique Aimon, Vice President of Technical and Scientific Communication at the Michelin Group. The purpose of this conference was to talk about how Michelin plans to tackle the issues of eco-friendliness, safety and cleanliness through different projects.

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According to Mr. Dominique, the demand for mobility will only continue to grow as the years go by, possibly in a multiple of 2 or 4. This would lead to high and low pressure creation among car tyres, as a result of which carbon dioxide emissions can increase. By 2000, 800 million vehicles have already been observed across the roads of the world, and this would increase hugely by 2050. Tyres are marked by the current dependency on fossil fuels and are always subject to raw material availability. In a tyre, 75% of raw materials are fossil based. Therefore, it is natural that by the year 2050, there is a lot of uncertainty on how these materials will be procured.

To counteract this situation, Michelin has evolved the 4R strategy, which stands for Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Renewable.

Reduce: To build lighter tyres which make lesser use of raw materials, making them lighter by almost 4-7%.. They also last longer than usual.

Reuse: Use of repairing and regrooving for usage of old tyres. For large Earth-mover tyres, safety plays a very important role and it is here that Michelin is looking at regrooving to reduce the weight.

Recycle: India is making good progress in the area of material recovery. The other type of recovery is Energy recovery, in which 55-70% cab be recovered, to be used in steel industry, cement factories and thermal power stations.

Renewable: Michelin will still continue to make use of Natural rubber. However, they are also in the process of discovering new methods of producing rubber from Biomass. For this, they have initiated 3 projects- with Amyris, Biobutterfly and with Helio Compound 4G. The end result here is to break the Sulphur bonds in rubber by making use of microbes, so that rubber equivalents can be produced in the future.

Special Features:


- Microbes can now be used to create rubber equivalents
- Reduction of fuel by using less rubber than earlier
- Energy can be saved and fuel efficiency increased by using newer tyres.
- Safety has always been the highest priority for Michelin. Thereby, the reused tyres will have to be meeting a certain level of rubber quality to meet safety guidelines.