Bridgestone India is ensuring circularity from manufacture to end-of-life.
The Greening of Bridgestone
Bridgestone India is taking steps to ensure sustainable tyres production. As part of the sustainability drive, Bridgestone India has established its own tyre recycling facility and supplements its power consumption from renewable sources.
The global plan for the tyre giant, is to reduce CO2 emissions by 50 per cent by 2030. According to Bridgestone, some 90 per cent of a tyre’s emissions come from its use and how it is used.
An ongoing strategy to reduce rolling resistance and improve economy can be seen in the firm’s Ecopia tyres.
Parag Satpute, Managing Director, Bridgestone India, says the company aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. At its Pune and Indore plants, solar energy of 6.7 MW supplements conventional energy.
In the tyre curing process, the company is using carbon-neutral biomass briquettes made from agriculture waste to fuel its boiler plants. The recently commissioned biomass boiler plant at Pune, built in collaboration with Thermax, can generate about 1,230 thousand tonnes of steam per annum, and cut 19,396 tonnes of carbon dioxide, says Satpute.
This saves about 69,000,000 Rupees in conventional energy usage in 2021, which is roughly what 11,326 urban households consume annually, he adds.
Bridgestone is also piloting some projects to put its end-of-life tyres to good use.
The steel extracted can be used by steel plants; and the crumb rubber modifier can be added to bitumen to increase the life of roads, besides being used as construction material, for landscaping mulch, floor mats and crafts according to Bridgestone India.
Source: The Hindu
