The economics of tire remanufacturing

The world market for tires is described to identify the current material flow from raw materials to tires and the used tire disposal problem. Then, I describe the value-adding operations in the tire production process and in the tire retreading process. Once retreading is identified as the only recovery alternative that maximizes tire utilization, I explain why heat generation is the only recovery alternative, when retreading is not technically feasible. The economic values of heat generation in electric plants and in cement kilns are discussed. The paper culminates with the case of retreading, the tire remanufacturing process and the recommendation of a simple decision rule for selecting the number of times a tire should be retreaded to maximize its utilization.     

Applying a mathematical approach to improve the tire retreading process

Problem of waste treatment is very important for environment and the share of tires in this scope is high. The aim of this paper is to analyse retreading as one very interesting way of tires’ treatment. In practice, firms involved with commercial vehicles exploitation have to decide whether to retread used tires or not, depending on the number of retreadings of used tires and travelled distances after each retreading. An approach based on Bayesian networks is proposed as a tool for decision making support in tire retreading process. Analysis is performed on database of tires’ exploitation from a company of public passenger transportation and the statistical results are used as inputs to the proposed model. The results obtained according to the proposed model provide a good basis when it comes to making a decision whether to retread or not a used tire.