End-to-End Sustainability: Improving End-of-Life Tyre Logistics

Compelling statistics reveal the escalating challenge facing the global tyre industry: over 800 million end-of-life tyres become waste annually1. Compounding this environmental burden, an estimated 6 million tons of tyre wear particles, ranging from microscopic rubber fragments to nanoparticles, are released globally each year2. This persistent impact, coupled with the projected increase in motor vehicle production—amounting to around 94 million vehicles manufactured globally in 2023, a nearly 11 percent year-on-year increase3—underscores an urgent imperative for sustainable transformation.

This transformation is no longer a distant goal, but an immediate strategic necessity for businesses. Beyond the obvious ecological and health concerns, the landscape is shifting due to growing regulatory pressure, such as the upcoming EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which mandates increased supply chain due diligence. To thrive in this evolving environment, businesses must proactively seek solutions that not only mitigate environmental harm but also build resilient, future-proof supply chains.

The Complexities of Sustainable Tyre Logistics

Achieving truly sustainable tyre logistics is a multifaceted endeavor, fraught with inherent challenges that stem from the very nature of tyre products and established industry practices. Understanding what these complexities are is the first step toward developing effective solutions.

Loading and Storage Optimization Challenges

Due to their unique shape and size, tyres inherently lead to significant wasted space during both storage and transport, often resulting in a high shipping weight for what is, by volume, a relatively low-value item. This challenge is further exacerbated by the fact that typical storage and transport containers are often not optimized for tyres. Such suboptimal loading directly contributes to a higher environmental footprint, as more shipments become necessary to move the same volume of product. This also leads to increased transportation expenses, significantly impacting overall profitability, further underscoring the unsustainable nature of current practices.

Ensuring Product Protection and Safe Handling

Tyres are highly susceptible to damage, including cuts, tears, and bulges—a vulnerability exacerbated by several factors throughout the supply chain. Manual handling is often a labor-intensive process with minimal automation, making it particularly challenging for heavier tyres. This increases the risk of accidental drops or impacts, which can directly lead to tyre damage, alongside the potential for human error or injury.

Moreover, current transportation practices frequently rely on specific, often proprietary, pallet designs which can lead to inefficient loose loading that fails to fully secure the product. Furthermore, storing tyres on their sidewalls rather than their treads can compromise both quality and safety4, as this practice risks overstressing the tyre carcass and breaking internal structural cords.

Overcoming Tyre Recycling Hurdles

Despite growing environmental awareness in the industry, effective tyre recycling faces substantial hurdles. Tyres are inherently difficult to recycle due to their complex composition, which includes a challenging mix of synthetic and natural rubber, various fillers, processing oils, and chemical additives. For example, materials like those in steel-belted radial tyres historically presented immense grinding difficulties and required high energy consumption, significantly impacting recycling viability5.

Compounding this material complexity, the sheer volume of end-of-life tyres presents a monumental logistical and processing challenge. This issue is further exacerbated by a pervasive lack of economically viable and scalable recycling methods, critically impeding the widespread adoption of circular practices for tyres.

What is Being Done to Make Tires More Sustainable?

To truly transform the tyre industry, innovation must span all four stages of the tyre lifecycle: (i) production, (ii) transportation, (iii) use, and (iv) end-of-life tyres. The overarching goal is to streamline the supply chain in order to get end-of-life tyres to recycling as efficiently as possible.

Sustainable Sourcing Initiatives

As the fundamental starting point of the tyre lifecycle, manufacturers bear the crucial responsibility of ensuring sustainable raw material sourcing. To this end, tyre manufacturers are actively partnering with rubber plantations to implement best practices in responsible, sustainable rubber production. Many companies have adopted natural rubber policies that are fully aligned with the policy framework of the Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber (GPSNR)6. A core pillar of this framework focuses on building Healthy Functioning Ecosystems & Resilient Agro-ecosystems, which means managing plantations in a way that preserves biodiversity, maintains soil and water health, and supports local communities, ensuring long-term ecological balance and agricultural viability.

This commitment to sustainable rubber production extends to actively addressing historical deforestation. Manufacturers are developing new rubber plantations and diligently planting trees in previously clear-cut areas to reverse environmental degradation. Furthermore, as part of a comprehensive sourcing strategy, the industry is increasingly integrating alternative raw materials. This includes utilizing renewable compounds like soybean oil7 and natural latex rubbers derived from green waste, thereby significantly reducing reliance on conventional, less sustainable resources.

Advancing Sustainable Manufacturing

A key challenge in advancing sustainable manufacturing is that raw recycled rubber typically has property limitations, restricting its use to concentrations of up to 25% in new products without compromising quality8. To overcome this, tyre manufacturers have set ambitious targets for increasing the recycled rubber content of their products. This necessitates extensive research into optimal blending methods to seamlessly integrate existing recycled rubber while matching the quality of virgin materials.

Concurrently, there is a distinct focus on developing high-technical secondary raw materials—essentially, improving the quality and performance of the recycled rubber itself—to enable higher concentrations in new formulations and develop new ranges of passenger car and truck tyres with enhanced sustainability profiles.

Beyond material composition, sustainable manufacturing also extends to product design. Furthermore, the industry is exploring revolutionary tyre structures, such as Michelin’s airless tires. These designs contribute to sustainable manufacturing by fundamentally altering the product lifecycle: the core hub and spoke remain constant, while only the treads need to be changed out for later use or modified for different applications9. This modularity significantly extends product life, reducing the frequency of full tyre replacement and thereby minimizing raw material consumption and manufacturing energy over the product's entire lifespan.

Tyre Transport Efficiency with Reusable Packaging Solutions

Optimizing transport efficiency is critical for a greener tyre lifecycle. This involves the development and implementation of transport modules specifically designed for maximum payload efficiency, reducing the number of journeys required.

To support the deployment of these optimized transport modules and further drive sustainability, companies can leverage Goodpack's flexible pay-per-use model. This IBC rental solution fundamentally shifts packaging from a fixed asset to a service, empowering businesses to significantly reduce their environmental footprint by promoting reuse and minimizing waste generated from traditional, single-use packaging. Global manufacturers, for instance, have already improved payload efficiency with Goodpack's solution, demonstrating its tangible benefits.

Beyond its profound environmental benefits, this model also eliminates substantial capital expenditure on packaging, transforming it into a predictable operating expense, while simultaneously enhancing overall transport efficiency by providing access to the precise containers needed, exactly when they are required. This approach allows businesses to optimize their packaging strategy without the burden of ownership and its associated costs of repair, storage, or disposal.

Fostering Reuse and Advanced Recycling

Beyond initial manufacturing and transport, the end-of-life phase of tyres presents substantial opportunities for advancing sustainability. A cornerstone of this is promoting retreading, a key method for extending the lifespan of commercial vehicle tyres and thereby significantly reducing waste and resource consumption. To facilitate widespread reuse, establishing robust reverse logistics systems is crucial for efficiently collecting and reintroducing these end-of-life tyres into the circular economy.

Building on these efforts, the industry is also investing heavily in developing efficient and cost-effective methods to create new, valuable products from recycled rubber, such as durable rubberized asphalt for roads and safe playground surfaces, effectively closing the loop on material usage.

TYRECUBE: How Goodpack Enhances Tyre Supply Chain Sustainability

The TYRECUBE solution, a strategic partnership between Goodpack and leading global logistics providers, is fundamentally transforming tyre logistics by simplifying complex movements often characterized by short order-to-delivery cycles. This innovative IBC packaging solution delivers across multiple vertical markets—from aviation through to passenger cars, motorbikes, trucks, and agricultural equipment—by utilizing a single common container handling unit throughout the entire supply chain.

These IBC rentals are meticulously designed for enhanced efficiency. Its galvanized steel construction directly addresses the problem of inefficient loose loading, providing superior protection for tyres. This significantly reduces damage during transit and safeguards product integrity, ensuring fewer losses. Further streamlining operations, the TYRECUBE also features a half-door, facilitating easier access for handling small parts or specific tyre types, thereby accelerating loading and unloading processes.

Crucially, the TYRECUBE integrates advanced barcode and RFID technology to track each shipment, providing comprehensive visibility from initial loading through final disposal. This capability enables valuable data harvesting for OEMs upon recycling if required, offering deeper insights into the entire supply chain—a significant advantage, particularly given the nascent data availability on EVs and their tyres. This cutting-edge system is supported by an unparalleled global scale, leveraging Goodpack's vast network of 400 plants across 70 countries and 4.5 million containers in global circulation. Goodpack's steadfast commitment to sustainable sourcing and closed-loop logistics is central to the TYRECUBE's transformative value proposition.

Paving the Way for a Sustainable Tyre Future

The journey towards a truly sustainable tyre industry, while undeniably complex, fundamentally demands continuous innovation across every stage of the product lifecycle—from raw material sourcing and manufacturing to efficient transport and advanced recycling. This requires a holistic strategy that intricately balances environmental impact, operational efficiency, and economic viability.

By proactively addressing inherent challenges like rubber degradation and optimizing logistics with smart, integrated solutions such as the TYRECUBE, the industry stands poised for profound transformation. These innovations, born from strategic partnerships and a deep commitment to reusability, exemplify how traditional linear models can evolve into efficient, sustainable, and data-rich circular supply chains. Ultimately, the future of tyre logistics is not just about overcoming hurdles, but about seizing the immense opportunity to build a resilient, resource-efficient, and truly circular economy for generations to come.

References

1 - Mayer, P. M., Moran, K. D., Miller, E. L., Brander, S. M., Harper, S., Garcia-Jaramillo, M., Carrasco-Navarro, V., Ho, K. T., Burgess, R. M., Thornton Hampton, L. M., Granek, E. F., McCauley, M., McIntyre, J. K., Kolodziej, E. P., Hu, X., Williams, A. J., Beckingham, B. A., Jackson, M. E., Sanders-Smith, R. D., & Fender, C. L. (2024). Where the rubber meets the road: Emerging environmental impacts of Tire Wear particles and their chemical cocktails. Science of the Total Environment, 927(171153), 171153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.171153

2 - Burgueño Salas, E. (2025, July 10). Motor Vehicle Production - Statistics & Facts. Statista. https://www.statista.com/topics/975/motor-vehicle-production/

3 - Brogan, C. (2023, February 23). Prioritise tackling toxic emissions from tyres, urge Imperial experts | Imperial News | Imperial College London. Imperial News. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/243333/prioritise-tackling-toxic-emissions-from-tyres/

4 - Where the rubber meets the road: tyre technology and logistics challenges. (n.d.). Magazine.automotivepurchasingandsupplychain.com. https://magazine.automotivepurchasingandsupplychain.com/magazine/issue34/tyre-logistics.html

5 - Kumar, D., Pei, Y., Han, B., Khoo, S. Y., Norton, M., Adams, S. D., & Kouzani, A. Z. (2025). Comparative analysis of waste tyre treatment technologies: Environmental and economic perspectives. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 216, 115691. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2025.115691

6 - PRESS RELEASE: Natural Rubber players adopt policies committed to healthy ecosystems and human rights. (2021, September 24). Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber. https://sustainablenaturalrubber.org/press-release-natural-rubber-players-adopt-policies-committed-to-healthy-ecosystems-and-human-rights/

7 - Goodyear Announces New Sustainable Soy-Based Tires for City Transit and Waste Haul Fleets. (2022, June 28). United Soybean Board. https://unitedsoybean.org/hopper/goodyear-announces-new-sustainable-soy-based-tires-for-city-transit-and-waste-haul-fleets/

8 - Innes, J. R. (2024, January 11). One-and-a-half billion tyres wasted annually – there’s a better way to recycle them. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/one-and-a-half-billion-tyres-wasted-annually-theres-a-better-way-to-recycle-them-208967

9 - The Future of Tires: Sustainable, Airless & Connected. (2021, May 26). Tire Review Magazine. https://www.tirereview.com/future-tires-sustainable-airless-connected/

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