From Bridgestone to Bolder: Proving Sustainability and Reliability at Scale

By Dave Abdallah

If you were born and grew up in Akron, Ohio when I did, there is a pretty good chance you had family in the tire or rubber industry. I grew up on North Firestone Boulevard and my wife grew up in Goodyear Heights. Dad was a tire builder at Firestone and Mom sold rubber chemicals at H. Muehlstein. Gramps was a draftsman at Firestone before World War 2 took him overseas and my uncle was a passenger and airplane tire builder at B.F. Goodrich. Another uncle was an earthmover tire builder at General and yet another uncle made golf grips at a now closed rubber shop in Barberton, Ohio.

My first awareness of the scrap tire problem came from my Mom. She brought home glossy photos of “Tire Mountain,” which was a pretty famous scrap tire pile in Colorado. The photos were brought to her by companies who were trying to get her company, a rubber chemical distributor, to sell “pyrolysis carbon black.” I had taken an early interest in science, so she thought I might like to see the sample she had been given. My next science project was a poster that had pictures of scrap tire piles and jars full of black liquid, steel cord and bead wire from a tire-shredding operation and the odd, black powder called “pyrolysis black.”

Back then nobody had any luck trying to get the black material into tires, but they kept trying...and failing. The tire industry has always been the largest consumer of carbon black and one might assume that tire companies could use the material. But this was the era or “radialization.” Radial tires were lighter, stronger and higher performing than ever before. Tire rubber compounds had enough going on without taking unnecessary risks with such a strange new material that didn’t act like regular carbon black. To the tire industry, carbon black is actually high technology and critical to rubber performance. It was years later before I thought about the technology again.

I tried to avoid it, but the rubber industry in Akron has a very powerful pull--I eventually ended up working at Bridgestone for 21 years. In 2010, I got my first management assignment and had the opportunity to lead a group called Advanced Materials Development. Our role was to look at new materials for tires. I started by asking the individual chemists in the group to review their projects with me. One chemist, Larry, showed me a project that referred to “recycled” carbon black. I asked him to explain what it was, and soon as I heard the word “pyrolysis,” I cringed.

Based on my experience with it, I expressed my opinions about the project. Larry patiently waited for the end of my speech and invited me to look at the data. I was amazed. Larry had gotten 2 recovered blacks very far down the path of approval into 3 compounds in consumer tires. All that was left were trials at commercial-scale volumes.

And that was the problem. In 2010, there were a few companies that had made great progress in the field of recovered carbon black, but no one knew how to build a reliable process that could scale enough to satisfy the appetite of even a small tire company. And without scale, survival was impossible.

I was so fascinated by how well the technology worked, I got involved. It was obvious that you can’t do business with a tire company without scale and reliable production. And tire companies do not normally volunteer to get involved with small materials suppliers without a good reason, but I campaigned to get Bridgestone to invest in the industry trying to use environmental impact as the payback. That effort became a project that is still running today. To be more involved with environmentally-conscious, sustainable processes, I left a long career at Bridgestone to join the small material suppliers industry.

After one iteration, I finally landed at Bolder Industries. I came to Bolder because they demonstrated to me that they can make a consistent product and they can run their operation 24/7/330. The process is so reliable, that scale is simply a matter of copying a process that already works. As a sales professional, having the confidence of great engineering and manufacturing people behind your product makes life a bit easier. Today we are in over 300 products with product evaluations going on at about 100 more. Of course new material adoption in any rubber-based industry is slow, but eventually we will make more products considerably more sustainable.

From where I started to now, so much about the rubber industry and its sustainability has changed, and being a part of Bolder Industries only shows how much I am eager to learn and innovate as we build more reliable, sustainable products. The ability to bridge the gap between current consumer needs and growing environmental demands is a real accomplishment that we are continuing to improve.