How to make an EV tire that won’t pollute the environment

Greetings from the world. We have done it. Since the passage of the Clean Air Act in the 1970s, we have dramatically reduced emissions of cancer-causing particulates from our cars and other sources, a change that has added years to our lives.

This is the good news. The bad news is that we can now spend more time focusing on the remaining resources, including some unexpected ones. In an EV era, tires are becoming the biggest emitters of particles and as we’ve seen, whether it’s microplastics in our shrimp or preservatives in our salmon, they have a worrying impact on our environment.

Gunnlaugur Erlendsson wants to do something about it. The affable Icelander founded Enso to address what he saw as a growing need for better EV tires. The UK-based company’s next big step is coming closer to home: a $500 million US tire factory specifically to build eco-friendly tires for electric vehicles.

Well, more environmentally friendly anyway.

According to Erlendsson, Enso’s founding in 2016 was “a little ahead of the curve” when it comes to EV adoption. “There were only a handful of research reports done on tire pollution, and almost none of them were really on the topic of microplastics or air pollution,” he said.

But the writing was on the way. Early industry movers, like the Tesla Model S, offered far more power than the internal combustion cars they competed with, but also carried massive weight penalties. A Model S Plaid, for example, is the same size as a Lexus ES, but is about 1,000 pounds heavier and has more than three times the horsepower. More weight and more power means more tire wear, leading to expensive and frequent trips to the shop for fresh tires.

While EV-specific tires are increasingly common, Erlendsson says most tire manufacturers are very focused on partnering with automakers, shipping new tires with new cars. “So even though the technology exists to make tires much better today, it’s not reaching 90 percent of the tire industry, which is the aftermarket,” he said.

While Erlendsson said Enso is working to develop partnerships with the same automakers, the company’s U.S. business model will focus 90 percent on creating tires in the right mounts for popular EVs, regardless of brand. and will then sell them directly to customers.

What sets Enso tires apart? Erlendsson was light on technical details, but promised 10 percent lower rolling resistance than regular tires, which equates to a proportional increase in range. This will make your EV cheaper to run, while a 35 percent increase in tire life means lower wear, less airborne particulates and fewer old tires sent to the incinerator, where half of all American tires die.

Enso’s new plant will also deal with recycling. It will be truly carbon neutral, not dependent on carbon offsets, and produce tires from recycled carbon and tire silica made from rice husks.

But what about 6PPD, the worrisome tire preservative that appears in our fish and even in our bodies? Enso is still using it, but its days are numbered.

“All the tire companies in the world are using 6PPD in their current production tires,” said Erlendsson. “The technology to remove 6PPD exists,” he added, but he declined to discuss the topic further, citing restrictions due to signed NDAs. Research bodies in California and Washington state have provided early evaluations of alternatives, but none appear to be a silver bullet that will save our tires without destroying the environment.

The use of 6PPD is still allowed, but the EPA recently issued new guidelines for monitoring its presence, and earlier this year, Washington state passed a bill regulating its use. More restrictions are coming, which Enso says he welcomes.

Enso aims to produce 5 million tires from the new plant by 2027. Its location is still being finalized, but Enso mentions Colorado, Nevada, Texas or Georgia as possible locations. With the southeastern U.S. becoming a hotbed for electric vehicle manufacturing and the so-called “Battery Strait” seeing heavy investment from startups like Redwood Materials, that last option may be the safest bet.

A factory of that size will be a big step for Enso, which now supplies tires exclusively for fleet use in the UK, including Royal Mail. for Guardiana study by Transport for London, which regulates public transport in the city, shows that Enso tires are living up to Erlendsson’s claims of increased efficiency, reduced consumption and reduced costs.

If Enso can deliver that on a larger scale to American drivers, it will defy typical corporate goals of selling more stuff to more people. Erlendsson sees this as a way to restore today’s tire economy.

“A proposition where you sell fewer tires is just not palatable to most listed companies in this industry,” he said. “It’s hard for someone with an old manufacturing and an old supply chain and an old distribution model to suddenly say, ‘I’m going to make fewer tires and spend more to make them,’ don’t lower your share price at the same time.”

Of course, upending a more than 150-year-old industry is no small feat either.