| Michelin to use wood in elastomer production for its tyres! The next step in eco-friendliness
As far as tyre manufacturing goes, Michelin is easily the more eco-friendly as they pioneered making plant based oils and vegetable grade stearic acid in their tyre production.
Of course oils when synthesized, contribute to the wastage and disposal problem and yet are the single most important process in tyre manufacturing. Now Michelin is thinking of making elastomers using wastage wood chips (and they also plan to have their in-house farm of plantains).
To put the process more into detail, the end goal is to obtain lignins from angiosperm (hard wood), gymnosperm (soft wood) or graminaceous (grass) sources, the production methodology for each varies but the end result as has been said before, is to obtain lignins which go on to become the cell walls of the newly injected rubber product.
The above approach to tyre making will make things a lot cheaper and more eco-friendly as the waste from wood and plants can go on to become critical molecular level building blocks of the tyre. For those who want an excellent read on the manufacturing process in general which I found super-interesting, I'll give the link below. As for Michelin.. three cheers. https://www.motorauthority.com/news/...-wood-in-tires https://boa.unimib.it/retrieve/handl...mib_072560.pdf | 
26th September 2018, 21:34
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