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 litres of oil compared to manufacturing a new tire.

In Canada, Kal Tire operates close to a dozen retread facilities, which retread approximately 350,000 tires annually—each one lowering customers’ carbon footprint and helping to keep tires out of the waste stream.

GOING GLOBAL WITH OTR RETREADING

To meet growing demand for this alternative to scrapping tires, Kal Tire has grown its retread services globally 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 are usually recycled into different rubber products: playground surfaces, roofing, and flooring. But Kal Tire is investing in a recycling solution that will see scrap tires recycled back into OTR retreaded tires.

Crumb rubber from scrap tires can’t simply be recycled into a new tire because it cannot be easily reformulated without an additional technical process known as devulcanization.

Working in partnership with Tyromer, Kal Tire has been testing the use of devulcanized rubber, also known as tire-derived polymer (TDP), in our retread operations since 2016. Tests have proven that blending 20 per cent of TDP into our rubber tread compound provides a high-quality product that performs in OTR applications just as well as our regular tread compound.

We use 166,000 pounds of TDP, on average, in our rubber tread compound each year. Through this process, we are creating a circular economy and focusing on long-term sustainability.