Discarded / used tyres

[Ciro Pabón]

Let's put things in perspective: there are about 600 million vehicles on Earth. So, you have about 4 million tyres discarded every day, assuming a car changes tyres every two years or so (600 days, give or take).

As you have a race every two weeks (well, I'd like that), those 1500 tyres give you about 100 more in the daily bucket. They represent 0,003% of the world daily output.

Tyres are recycled into asphalt, new tyres (yeah, they use old tyres to make new tyres, sorry about that ), brake linings, carpet underlays, shoe soles, industrial adhesives and paints.

Some people use them in playgrounds (as a safe surface, crumbed of course), sporting surfaces (like the orange athletic tracks around some fields) or as landscape mulch.

This thread reminds me of people arguing about the energy consumption of night races, you know, because of lights around the track.

We (or at least, I) concluded that if everybody sipped a cup of coffee because of waking up early or staying late to watch a race with a different schedule, the use of energy in heating the coffee water would be many, many times the use of energy in the track.

I don't remember if it was one hundred thousand times or so... We could do the same math for the tyres discarded by the 100 million viewers of the race (many have a car). The very same day of the race viewers have to (or, as a minimum, should) recycle about 100.000 times the number of tyres discarded by F1. C'mon.

Worrying about F1 tyres, with cars that use about one gallon every 2 km (not sure) and that cost 100 or 300 millions apiece is... well, let's not put adjectives into it, you can do it for me.

Giving credit to Bridgestone because they recycle old F1 tyres would be the same old (insert adjective or four letter noun here).

Besides, bright idea as it is, if somebody were selling all the old F1 tyres, let's picture this: after a year and 20,000 tyres sold, I think people (at least me) would start to value them in the same way they value (insert another ugly and distasteful four letter word here).

[DaveKillens]

One thing that was drilled into me when I was first exposed to racing was that when the car hit the track, it's value became ZERO. Why is that? Simple, because that beautiful car could be reduced to a pile of scrap metal in a fraction of a second.

It's even worse with racing tires as in the case of Formula One, because once they are used, they are entirely worthless (with the exception of autopsies to learn and their scrap value).

My assumption is that at the end of every event, Bridgestone scraps all tires, that removes a lot of problems, including having to ship obsolete equipment.


Another story.. while I was visiting the NASCAR races shops around Charlotte, NC, I had many opportunities to purchase an old tire from the shops, and cheap.. something like 25 bucks. Heck, old lug nuts were sitting there in a plastic container, and they were selling for less than a buck apiece. How would you like to get hold of an item used in a race by your favorite driver, for less than a buck?

[Jersey Tom]

Tyres are recycled into asphalt, new tyres (yeah, they use old tyres to make new tyres, sorry about that )

Not where I work.. or it's certainly minimized. Tight control over the ingredients that go into race tires.