RETREADING TIRES

Canada's largest retreading company

We help commercial truck and mining customers extend the life of their tires and reduce their carbon footprint by applying a new tread to the casing of used tires. Each time we retread a commercial truck tire, we save almost 57 liters of oil compared to manufacturing a new tire. This environmentally friendly practice also reduces the amount of virgin materials required to manufacture a tire (rubber, steel and carbon black).

To meet growing demand for this alternative to scrapping tires, Kal tire has grown its retread services internationally and has six state-of-the-art OTR (off-the-road) tire retreading facilities in Canada (two), the UK, West Africa, Mexico and Chile.

GOING GLOBAL WITH OTR RETREADING

To meet growing demand for this alternative to scrapping tires, Kal Tire has grown its retread services and now has world-class off-the-road (OTR) tire retreading facilities in the UK, Africa and Latin America.

Creating a Circular Economy

In Canada, scrap tires have historically been ground down and recycled into rubber products such as: playground surfaces, roofing, and flooring. This process allows the rubber material to have a second life, thus slowing down the products from ending up in the landfill. But Kal Tire has invested in a closed-loop recycling solution that enables the scrap tires to be reclaimed back into retreaded tires.

During the retreading process, the remaining tread (part of the tire that meets the ground) needs to be removed from the casing (body of the tire). The pieces of rubber generated from this step then further reduced to the size of granulated sugar, known as rubber crumb. However, rubber crumb cannot be added directly to a tire and requires an additional technical process known as devulcanization.

Kal Tire is proud to be commercializing proprietary devulcanization technology, developed by the University of Waterloo, which is a 100% clean, and chemical-free process. Tests have proven that blending TDP into our rubber tread compound provides a high-quality product that performs in retread applications as well as other tread compounds.

Through this process, and others, we are creating a circular economy and focusing on long-term sustainability.