Michelin innovates for a greener world

Building boldness

As sustainable development is a global issue, it needs efforts from not just one company, but the whole industry and society at large. In the past decades, Michelin has been promoting various types of cooperation to move toward a sustainable future.

The Movin'On summit was created and inspired by Michelin in 2017 and is formerly known as Michelin Challenge Bibendum. It has attracted policy makers, entrepreneurs, scientists, scholars and people working at non-governmental organizations to discuss transportation challenges, where decarbonizing is a key topic.

The Movin'On summit was established out of a common vision shared by all its members: mobility is at the heart of human development, but must evolve within a sustainable framework: safer, greener, more connected, more inclusive, and more efficient.

Today, Movin'On has become a world-leading ecosystem of strategic anticipation and co-innovation for sustainable mobility, which provides concrete solutions and innovations for everyone's mobility needs, with the aim of contributing to societal progress while acting for the planet.

Michelin is also a member of the Tire Industry Project which was founded under the framework of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in 2005.Its mission lies in discerning how the life cycle of tires influences the environment and people's health and formulating detailed goals and action plans.

TIP has made several notable achievements: releasing a guideline for waste tire management, issuing several study reports on tire and road wear particles and formulating key environmental performance indicators related to TIP members' production.

Its 10 member companies drew up a road map for the tire industry to attain sustainable development goals and set seven action plans on supply chains, operations and also products and services.

They desire to make the natural rubber value chain fair, just and environmentally harmless and implement sustainable purchasing. They hope that smart tires and digitized solutions can speed up the conversion into sustainable transport.

A series of cooperation projects are under way in different regions and fields.

Michelin is partnered with the European BlackCycle project which recycles scrap tires to get high-quality raw materials, which are used to make new tires and other products.

It has joined hands with Canadian company Pyrowave to reclaim styrene from plastic in packaging, insulating boards and home appliances to make synthetic rubber.

Michelin has begun construction on its first tire recycling plant in collaboration with Enviro, a Swedish company that has developed a patented technology to recover carbon black particles, oil, steel and gas from end-of-life tires. Based in Chile's Antofagasta region, the plant will be able to recycle 30,000 metric tons of earthmover tires a year, or nearly 60 percent of such tires scrapped every year nationwide.

In China, Michelin actively cooperates with the government, China Rubber Industry Association, automobile manufacturers, and upstream and downstream enterprises to jointly accelerate the green transformation of the mobility industry.