This article was produced in collaboration with Pirelli and was first published in Rouleur Issue 139
Leave bicycles aside for a minute. Ask most people about the climate cost of our vehicles, and they’ll tend to fret about emissions from combustion engines or the damage done by extracting fossil fuels. Some might question the mining and manufacturing footprint of electric vehicles. Most will ignore tyres, although, of course, they too, and perhaps more noticeably with heavier EVs, are a factor as they are – excuse the terrible pun – where the rubber meets the road in terms of environmental impact.
While not the only part of a vehicle subject to wear and tear, tyres, because of their importance to driving safety, must be regularly replaced, so we go through quite a few of them. The total number is hard to quantify, but many millions of tyres are produced each year so reducing their potential impact on the environment is important – which is what makes Pirelli so interesting.
It’s easy to dismiss green claims from large corporations; our culture has become inured to vague pledges and catchy slogans from even the worst environmental offenders. But Pirelli aren’t making indefinite promises. They’ve been hard at work, making a real effort to limit their impact. And the results are impressive. Their website goes into a lot of detail, but here’s the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) version: An 80% reduction in their direct emissions by 2030 and a 30% reduction in lifecycle emissions – as in, after the tyre leaves the factory – in the same timeframe, followed by a 90% reduction by 2040. Manufacturing CO2 emissions have been cut by 57% since 2018, with a 26% supply chain cut in CO2 in the same period. Some high-end tyres are now made from a minimum of 55% recycled and bio-based materials, with wear rates cut by 25%, and all of their factories purchase 100% renewable electricity. They are also electrifying the vulcanisation process, which is how the tyres are actually formed and which, until recently, had been done at great energy expense using steam. But more on that anon. Water usage has been halved since 2015, and 97% of waste is recycled. And last but certainly not least – they are in the business of making tyres, after all – in 2021, Pirelli launched the world’s first tyre using Forest Stewardship Council-certified natural rubber. It probably won’t surprise you to read that all of this is way ahead of the rest of the industry.
So, what sparked this climate-consciousness? “I could talk for an hour just on this question,” says Matteo Battaini, the company’s head of sustainability. “We’ve taken on this ambitious sustainability target to be ahead of the industry, because that’s part of who we are. For over 150 years, Pirelli has always been a pioneer. So, we decided to move first. Pirelli has always been at the cutting edge of innovation, and we see sustainability as innovation.
Natural rubber (Image: Alessandro Scotti)
“But now, in addition to that company DNA, also our customers are asking about sustainability. It’s something everyone is thinking about now. “We have two kinds of customer. First, we have car manufacturers who are looking to lower their carbon footprint, and have more control over their supply chain, because they, like us, have to comply with tighter regulations. And they’re also motivated by the other kind of customers, the general public, because now you have a new generation of consumer that values sustainability a lot more than older generations did. So now, materials that don’t have a negative impact on the environment, and companies who take care of the social aspect of their business, those are key values.
“Our market is smaller than some of our competitors’, but we’re concentrated on the upper end, both for cars and for bikes. And that customer is leading because they’re sensitive to the topic of sustainability. This is an opportunity for us not only to do the right thing, but also to position our brand at the forefront, and at the same time, anticipating future regulations is more cost effective.”
It’s refreshing to hear it put in such rational terms. Some of the marketing teams flogging holier-than-thou messaging could learn a thing or two. All of us, from producers to end users, have a responsibility to limit the ecological and social impact of what we buy and sell, but at the end of the day, the business side of it has to work or we’d all be out of our jobs.
“From a cycling perspective, it’s not by chance that we’ve partnered with Trek,” offers Samuele Bressan from Pirelli’s cycling division. “They’re the only bike company in the peloton that owns the licence for their team, so they can inject into the racing team whatever culture they want. And as one of the biggest brands in the bicycle industry, they’ve already put a big focus on sustainability, trying to improve every element of the bike – frame, wheels, bottle cages – and tyres are a part of that. So we’ve found a lot of common ground. It’s the reason we’ve signed a long-term partnership with them. We’re all trying to achieve the same goals.
“Yes, they want to improve performance, but they also want to be the first professional team with zero carbon footprint. Our other team partner, Deceuninck, are also putting a high priority on reducing their impact. I can’t speak for the other teams or bicycle brands, but I think in general that’s the direction the industry is going because, as Matteo said, that’s what the customer wants.”
Pirelli is on a sustainability breakaway, it seems. It will be interesting to see how long it takes the rest of the industry to catch up. But have the reductions made in the last decade come from myriad marginal gains, or have there been breakthroughs, too?
Battaini again: “I think it’s been a combination of factors, from mentality to actions and strategy. We have 18 factories around the world, so when you make changes, even small ones such as changing the kind of lights we use, it adds up to a big difference.
“Something that’s not yet included in our published reductions because it’s still quite new, is a major technological change. We’re switching the curing presses from steam, which has been used by the industry for 150 years, to electric. That will make a big difference countries in the world, mostly Asia, some from Brazil, a small amount from Africa, which presents another target for us because in a lot of those regions, working practices, child labour, human rights might not be up to the standards here in Europe.
“Tackling these social issues is also a big part of our sustainability commitment. Our work in these communities has to ensure that people are paid in a fair way and have suitable working conditions. So by using FSC-certified natural rubber, it’s a way for us to support what’s most needed in these regions, in a way that wouldn’t be possible for one company on its own.”
“It’s also been interesting to better understand the performance link to sustainability,” adds Paolo Brivio, chief technical officer of Pirelli’s cycling department. “If you take rolling resistance, for cycling it’s all about performance, because riders aren’t burning petrol or electricity to move, but for the automotive industry, it’s something that’s integral to their sustainability goals. With these new materials, we’re working towards less rolling resistance for cars because it uses less fuel and makes less noise, without losing anything in terms of braking performance or wet-weather grip. It’s a huge challenge for the R&D department.
“For a car, if you reduce the resistance, you reduce fuel consumption. So it’s a clear sustainability target. For cyclists, it’s just about performance. The teams are always asking for tyres with less rolling resistance because they want to go faster. There’s some commonality in how we approach the reductions, but with new materials, you have to find the balance because there’s always a trade-off. After all, the secret is not how to reduce rolling resistance, because in the most basic sense, you can just use less material, but for a cycling tyre, that would reduce puncture resistance. The secret is getting to know these to our goal of reducing carbon emissions, but it gives us an advantage as well, because it uses much less energy – an electric press is 80% more efficient than a steam one. So, as I was saying about opportunities earlier, this has been a breakthrough that was driven by sustainability, but it has actually produced a real economic and efficiency benefit to the business.
“In terms of materials, we also need to decarbonise the supply chain, and that means we have to move away from fossil-derived materials by using something that’s bio based and recycled, so that at least we’re not buying new fossil-derived substances.”
“We want to produce a tyre that is 100% bio based and recycled,” Battaini continues. “That’s not something we can do in weeks or months, so we have to plot a path for five, 10, 15 years. And it’s important to say that we’re not just changing materials: for this to be feasible we have to show that in terms of R&D, performance, cost, we can produce a tyre that performs better than what is currently on the market.”
To this end, Pirelli has already made remarkable progress. Its EV-specific tyre, the P Zero E, is made from more than 55% recycled and bio-based materials, blending natural rubber, rice husks, and bio resins.
Brivio sheds light on that project. “The P Zero brand is well known for performance, so it was a challenge to make a more sustainable tyre without losing any of the characteristics you’d expect. I don’t want to say that the bio-based and recycled materials are better or worse than the synthetic alternative, but they are different, and we had to learn how to work with them. We had to get to know the material, play with the recipe. For example, we used silica made from rice husks for wet-weather grip, and it performs well, but it’s not the same as the silica used in other tyres, so we learned a lot in the development process, because it’s all new.”
FSC-certified natural rubber (Image: Dontmovie)
“It’s the same with our P Zero Race tyre,” interjects Bressan, bringing us back to bikes. “Last year, it became the first bicycle tyre to be made with FSC-certified natural rubber, and it’s our best-performing tyre. This year we’ve done something similar with the Cinturato Evo endurance tyre; it’s more than 50% recycled and bio-based materials, including FSC rubber. And again, the performance improved. I think it’s an important demonstration of what’s possible, because we’re showing that it’s possible to make a better-performing product while giving the consumer a product that they can feel good about from a sustainability perspective.”
A slight non-sequitur, but on the subject of FSC certification, Battaini offers an important reminder as to the human cost of the products we consume: “Natural rubber only comes from a few new materials and producing something that outperforms our competitors without making trade-offs.”
“We want to show people that we’re doing the hard work,” says Bressan. “They don’t have to compromise, which is something that happens in other industries. Take clothing, for example, if you want something waterproof, the natural materials won’t outperform synthetics. That’s not a trade-off we want people to make with tyres. We want to improve the sustainability and the performance at the same time.”
“We’re driving it,” says Brivio, in agreement. “Perhaps even more than consumers, we want to be sustainable, it’s becoming a part of Pirelli. Whether it’s cars or bikes, we want to innovate and lead the way. What we’ve learned, from so many years making car tyres and even Formula One, with bicycles, it’s not just a matter of copying the recipe 100% from an F1 tyre to what we use in the pro peloton. It’s not possible. There are different forces at work, different interactions between the tyre and the tarmac, different pressures. In Formula One, the tyres are at two bars of pressure, compared to four, five, six on a road bike.
“It seems like a paradox, but the stresses are actually much higher in a cycling tyre compared to a car. So there’s no one recipe that we can use across different categories and every time we develop a new material, we have to understand how it functions in each application. We don’t have a material dedicated to Formula One or to cycling, but what is transferable is our knowledge, our understanding of the mechanics of how rubber interacts with tarmac, we have the same laboratory, the same mixing machinery. So, whether it’s cycling or F1 or MotoGP, the common thread is our know-how.”
“We took many years developing an alternative to the steam press for our tyre moulds,” says Battaini. “It’s important to keep questioning what can be done with technology. Materials are the same. We have people looking at ways to create materials from various biological sources and I’m confident that new solutions will present themselves.
“But looking at what we’ve already achieved at Pirelli, in terms of less-impact materials and our carbon footprint, I think it’s already been a big step in the right direction and sign of what the industry can do.
“Looking to the future, for sure the goal for mobility must be to be cleaner and safer, and I believe, digitally connected. Thinking of the tyre, it’s the only part of your bike or your car that actually touches the road, and transmitting that data digitally is something that we’re already working on. It’s something we want to pioneer; sensors in the tyres that can communicate with the user and with the wider transport infrastructure to make everyone safer and more efficient, measuring things like energy usage, emissions, and so on. That’s the next frontier.”
Read more from Rouleur Issue 139:
