Uses tires from used plastic bottles in the Tour de France
In this year’s Tour de France, all accompanying cars will be equipped with tires made from recycled plastic bottles. This year’s race starts in Danish Copenhagen on 1 July.
Continental tires are one of the partners for the Tour de France, and this year all the official accompanying cars will be equipped with tires with polyester taken from recycled plastic bottles, called ContiRe.Tex technology.
Sustainable polyester yarns are sourced from ordinary PET bottles using a mechanical process, and have been used in the construction of new tires.
Together with partners OTIZ, which is a fiber specialist and textile manufacturer, Continental has developed a special technology for recycling PET bottles without previously necessary chemical steps.
As part of the recycling processes, the bottles are first sorted, corks are removed and finally mechanically cleaned. After a mechanical shredding, the bottles are then melted before being granulated. After this ordinary solid state polymerization and a modified spinning process. In this way, Continental gets hold of polyester yarn in a far more environmentally friendly way than before.
This technology was presented as sent as this autumn, and in this summer’s bike races they are in use in the tires PremiumContact 6 and EcoContact 6 Q.
– We Tour de France have sustainability goals, and therefore it was a matter of course for us to use the newest, most environmentally friendly and most durable tires we have in this year’s race, says product manager for Continental Tires Norway, Knut Knudsen.
The technology is used as ContiRe.Tex, and each tire that Continental delivers for this year’s Tour contains polyester from about 40 recycled PET bottles.
-We are very proud to be able to introduce a sustainable solution based on this technology. We are already using this technology in the motorsport championship Extreme E, and will in a short time put some tires into series production, Knudsen explains.
Continental aims to become the leading tire manufacturer when it comes to ecological and social responsibility by 2030. By 2050, Continental wants 100% of the materials in the tires to be produced sustainably, and for the entire value chain to be completely climate neutral.
This year’s Tour de France is the 109th edition of the classic bike race, and it all starts in Danish Copenhagen on 1 July. 21 stages and 3300 kilometers later the Tour ends in Paris. 176 riders from 22 teams will go through, among other things, six mountain stages, including the legendary L’Alpe d’Huez, as well as a 19 kilometer long stage on cobblestones.
– The Tour de France is exciting. Not only because of the bike ride, but also because of the strain on both the bike tires and the tires on the accompanying cars, Knudsen concludes.