Product quality, safety and customer satisfaction are our ultimate goals. Goodyear’s Procurement and Technology teams actively seek sustainable material options that deliver product performance while meeting our high standards of quality and safety. To advance Goodyear’s sustainable material use, our Technology teams work to investigate new alternative raw materials and incorporate innovative solutions.

Goodyear has increased our use of bio-based oils to help us reach our goal of fully replacing petroleum-based oils in our products by 2040. When considering our total sustainable oil usage in place of petroleum-based oils, our 2022 increase was 28%.

One example of this is our use of soybean oil. Goodyear utilizes commodity soybean oil, a surplus that is available beyond food applications, in our polymer and tire manufacturing processes in a variety of ways depending on the application. We have announced sustainability goals around the increased use of soybean oil in our products. Goodyear established a goal in 2018 to increase the use of soybean oil in place of petroleum-based oil by 25% by the end of 2019. We met and far exceeded this goal by increasing our soybean oil use by 90% in 2019, 73% in 2020 and 13% in 2021. We increased our use of soybean oil by 89% in 2022 over 2021. This goal is supported by the established versatility of the technology, along with the demonstrated performance and processing advantages.

Additionally, Goodyear now uses a silica product made from residual rice husk ash—a byproduct of rice processing. Rice husk ash (RHA) silica can help deliver performance similar to traditional sand-based silica yet is more environmentally friendly and helps reduce waste going to landfill. Over the past several years, we have introduced the use of RHA silica in several of our global manufacturing facilities. We have been working closely with our suppliers to explore further expanding the use of RHA silica. In 2018, we had set a goal to double our use by 2021 when compared to 2018 use. Impacts related to our RHA silica suppliers’ footprint limited our ability to source the expected RHA silica volume in 2021. However, in 2022, we successfully secured RHA silica volumes that placed us at a 101% increase compared to our 2018 baseline.

In 2023, Goodyear expects to continue to advance the science and technology and conduct research to bring new materials that deliver quality and performance.