Continental summer, all-season tyres gain PET bottle sustainability

By the end of 2022, drivers in the UK will be able to equip their vehicles with Continental summer or all-season tyres made using polyester from recycled PET bottles. Continental calls this sustainable material ContiRe.Tex and began incorporating it into some tyre lines in April. The initial range coming to the UK consists of 15 dimensions in total, with five sizes of PremiumContact 6, EcoContact 6 and AllSeasonContact available.

ContiRe.Tex is able to completely replace the use of conventional polyester in the tyre casing. The polyester yarn it contains is obtained from used PET bottles without any intermediate chemical steps or other recycling processes, making it significantly more efficient than other methods for processing PET bottles into high-performance polyester yarns.

Bottles used for the technology come exclusively from regions without a closed recycling loop. A set of standard passenger car tyres uses the material from around 40 recycled PET bottles. These tyres are identifiable by the ‘Contains Recycled Material’ logo on the sidewall.