Bridgestone’s Data-driven Approach to Renewable Tires: What’s Inside Your Tire Really Matters

I have always been fascinated with how products are designed, built, and labeled. A product’s label is like a great dashboard in that it blends design appeal with fact-based information to tell you a story. Tires are no different, except that the product itself must also serve as the label bringing together function and form. 

When selecting your next tire, you will probably consider the most common attributes: durability, comfort, noise, handling, and traction on varied terrains. Take a closer look at your tires and you will see a wealth of information imprinted on the sidewall. There are numbers galore from aspect ratios, maximum pounds per square inch (PSI), rim diameter, load index, speed ratings, production dates and locations, and more. Many of these are standardized and regulated by government transportation agencies to ensure proper usage with your vehicle. And with good reason. Tires are first and foremost a safety product. They carry us and our families through adverse load, torque, and weather conditions. At Bridgestone, we recognize this and put safety first, always.  

I want to draw your attention to the numbers inside your tire. We face unprecedented strain on our ecological resources and environment. Designing a more sustainable product has never been more important to Bridgestone. Earlier this year, Bridgestone announced the Bridgestone E8 Commitment – our eight values that solidify our commitment to a more sustainable world and earn the trust of current and future generations. 

In addition, Bridgestone is aggressively working to achieve our 2050 sustainability goals of carbon neutrality and making tires from 100% renewable resources. “Delivering on these commitments requires product engineers, product planning, procurement, manufacturing, and sales working together to manage a new product attribute … sustainable content. This work is not possible without data connected across the product lifecycle with rich analytics to determine optimal design scenarios,” said Bill Niaura, Executive Director, Sustainable Materials and Circular Economy.

When our Bridgestone Data & Analytics team recognized this, we got excited about the potential impact we could make. We have partnered closely with our Sustainability, Product Development, and Manufacturing teams to develop new analytics on the end-to-end lifecycle of the tires we produce. This required updated data structures, new design tools for engineers, and a visualization tool for our customers.

There are three important methods we used:

• Define the Objectives

We started by defining the objectives with the stakeholders. The objectives were to report on the progress of corporate sustainability metrics, enable sustainability target setting for new programs, and empower customer communications.

• Start with a Proof of Concept and then Iterate

We defined a clear phase-based approach to start with a proof of concept in a particular tire segment. We used agile development techniques to iterate, improve, and expand the initial proof of concept into a full-scale solution.

• Focus on Data Quality and Automation

We needed to put a special focus on the data quality to collect, define, model, and calculate from multiple sources. Because of the sensitivity of the data combined with new data types, the challenge was to create an automated process to calculate recyclable and renewable content of all tires in the portfolio.

We achieved this by defining the weight of each component inside the tire, applied algorithms from our material forecasting process, and then specified the percentage of recycled or renewable materials in each specific component. And in doing so, we defined a new tire attribute that we refer to as material circularity. At its basis, material circularity is a measure of the sustainable content within a tire by taking the weight of renewable components plus recycled components divided by the total weight of all components. By deriving this calculation from the detailed data, we can draw new insights and actions that are informing how we design tires.

Now, the team is looking at the percentages of sustainable and recycled materials by product, brand, category, line, article, size, plant, and customer. Through these insights, we are making meaningful design choices at a detailed component level in our engineering and manufacturing bill of materials. This is also enabling the organization to effectively plan, manage, and communicate in the new language of sustainability.

“Sustainable materials are where we focused first, but we're not stopping there,” said Niaura. “Our data-driven approach to sustainability is accelerating improvements in CO2 tracing and reduction, carbon pricing, financial disclosures, raw material yields, end-of-life tire recycling, and life cycle assessment (LCA) models.”

At Bridgestone, what’s inside your tire really matters. We deliver products that are safe, designed to meet customer performance requirements, and sustainable for our shared future.

About the Author

Jason Beyer is the Vice President of Data & Analytics at Bridgestone Americas, the largest tire and rubber company in the world focused on building “Sustainable Solutions for Your Journey.” Beyer is also the Global CDO Ambassador for the State of Tennessee and a CDO Magazine Global Editorial Board member. He is an experienced executive with more than 24 years leading diverse global teams in automotive, industrial manufacturing, construction, medical device, retail, and government industries.