Given that product quality, safety and customer satisfaction are our ultimate goals, our Procurement and Technology teams actively seek sustainable material options that deliver product performance while meeting our high standards of quality and safety and avoiding increasing supply or production costs.

To advance Goodyear’s sustainable material use, our Technology teams work to incorporate new innovations and use and/or investigate alternative raw materials that are more sustainable, such as innovative new rubber and soybean oil. As an example, we have announced sustainability goals around the increased use of soybean oil in our products, including the goal 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. When considering our total sustainable oil usage in place of petroleum-based oils, our 2021 increase was 27%. Our long-term goal of full petroleum oil replacement in our products by 2040 remains in place. These goals are supported by the established versatility of the technology, along with the demonstrated performance and processing advantages.

In 2020, Goodyear set a goal to create a tire made 100% from sustainable materials by 2030. Our scientists and engineers made great progress toward that goal by developing a 70% sustainable-material tire. The demonstration tire includes 13 featured ingredients, including three different carbon blacks produced from methane, carbon dioxide, and plant-based oil; soybean oil; rice husk ash silica; and polyester recycled from plastic bottles and other plastic waste.

Another example is our use of bio-based replacements for silica. Goodyear is now using 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 and set a goal to double our use by 2021 when compared to 2018 use. We made significant progress toward that goal in 2019 as our usage increased by 74%. However, COVID-19-related effects on production impacted our 2020 use of RHA silica, resulting in an increase of 47% compared to 2018 use. Impacts related to our RHA silica suppliers’ footprint limited our ability to source the expected RHA silica volume in 2021. For 2022, Goodyear has successfully secured RHA silica volumes that place us beyond our 2021 commitment.