Retreading: Your Fleet's Biggest Economic Advantage
Big Truck TV
Kevin Rohlwing, Senior Vice President of the Tire Industry Association, discusses some of the myths about retreading tires, the advancements made in recent years and using retreads to lower your tire costs.
In a perfect world you buy that new tire, you retread it two or three times and then you recycle it and it's an endless loop. And then we're not throwing anything away. And it's really an effective way for fleets to save money. Because of the cost savings and also the performance side of it too. If you don't get the performance the cost savings are pointless. So you have to have both.
The performance advantages in today's retreads is so much better. With inspection technology and just uniformity in general that it really makes sense for a fleet to use retreading to lower cost per mile. It may not work on every vehicle, it may not work on every fleet, but you certainly can find areas where quality retreads are gonna deliver equal to or better than the results of a new tire. And in fact, in some instances, retreads can actually improve the performance over a new tire because they have the ability to change different compounds.
It's real easy to produce different types of tread compounds and different types of tread designs when you're talking about retreading because it's a much faster process from the manufacturing standpoint.
The cost savings between retreads and new tires is going to be anywhere from three to one, four to one even five to one in some instances. There's a tremendous difference in the amount of time, energy, rubber and resources that are needed to produce a new tire versus a retread.
The example that we love to give is you know, the barrels of oil on the the millions of barrels of oil that retreading saves because tires are largely petrochemical products. And, if you think about the casing itself, sixty seventy eighty percent of the cost of building that tire goes into building the casing which is the belt packages, the beads and the actual body of the tire itself.
How many times can a tire be retreaded?
In a perfect world you buy that new tire, you retread it two or three times and then you recycle it and it's an endless loop. And then we're not throwing anything away. And it's really an effective way for fleets to save money. Because of the cost savings and also the performance side of it too. If you don't get the performance the cost savings are pointless. So you have to have both.
What kind of performance can I expect from a retread?
The performance advantages in today's retreads is so much better. With inspection technology and just uniformity in general that it really makes sense for a fleet to use retreading to lower cost per mile. It may not work on every vehicle, it may not work on every fleet, but you certainly can find areas where quality retreads are gonna deliver equal to or better than the results of a new tire. And in fact, in some instances, retreads can actually improve the performance over a new tire because they have the ability to change different compounds.
It's real easy to produce different types of tread compounds and different types of tread designs when you're talking about retreading because it's a much faster process from the manufacturing standpoint.
What are some of the cost savings associated with retreads?
The cost savings between retreads and new tires is going to be anywhere from three to one, four to one even five to one in some instances. There's a tremendous difference in the amount of time, energy, rubber and resources that are needed to produce a new tire versus a retread.
The example that we love to give is you know, the barrels of oil on the the millions of barrels of oil that retreading saves because tires are largely petrochemical products. And, if you think about the casing itself, sixty seventy eighty percent of the cost of building that tire goes into building the casing which is the belt packages, the beads and the actual body of the tire itself.
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