There are about 1 billion tires made each year; each and every one of them uses 7 gallons of crude oil to produce. Although 7 billion gallons is just a small blip (0.5%) of the overall global annual use of crude oil (~1.3 trillion gallons), figuring out a way to make tires from something other than crude oil will, nonetheless, clearly help us in our goal to a sustainable transportation future.
At the American Chemical Society Meeting in San Francisco yesterday, Joseph McAuliffe, a scientist from biotech company Genencor, announced that he and his team have discovered a method to produce one of the key ingredients for tires from sugars derived from sugarcane, corn, corn cobs, switchgrass and/or other biomass.