Bringing Tires Full Circle: How Traceability Enhances Recovery and Sustainability

The world depends on tires for mobility, but without traceable recovery and recycling programs, they can create major waste management problems and squander valuable resources. Given the environmental and public health implications of landfilled and dumped tires, jurisdictions around the world have put laws on the books to incentivize tire recovery and recycling. But the level of value chain scrutiny associated with recovery models in industry driven or extended producer responsibility (EPR) systems require a complete tracking system that can definitively say where tires come from and where they go. It’s a big change from the paper record-keeping often used by tire stakeholders like municipalities, mom-and-pop auto shops and small recyclers. That's why eTracks developed the eSustainable Recovery Platform (eSRP), a tracking platform designed to give tire producers the flexibility and adaptability to take control of their products at the end of their first life through a user-friendly interface. In this series sponsored by eTracks, we'll dive into lessons learned from tire recycling in Ontario, Canada and explore how tire tracking and recovery is scaling around the world.