Where do your tires go once you've schralped them to pieces? A question not many riders know the answer to, and in fairness it greatly depends on how you dispose of them.
Unfortunately many people have no idea how to recycle rubber let alone the complex assembly of wire, steel, rubber and Kevlar that makes up many bicycle tires, and so, they end up in the landfill.
There's a lot of good we feel we do as a bicycle manufacturer, but there's no hiding that we are responsible for putting a lot of tires out into the world. So we'd like to do something about it and help others do the same.
In comes Tire Stewardship BC (TSBC) which is a program essentially funded by the automotive industry. Every new car tire that is sold in BC comes with an Advance Disposal Fee (ADF), more commonly known as an Eco Fee, which is remitted to TSBC and helps fund the program.
Those of you who pay close attention to your receipts might know that there is no such fee for bicycle tires. But fear not! The kind guys and gals at TSBC allow us cyclists to piggy back onto this program for free. Your local bike shop just needs a good relationship with a nearby automotive tire retailer, and the TSBC will pick up the tyres at no cost to either the bike shop or auto shop.
You can find a list of participating shops in BC here. If you don't see your local shop in there, we encourage you to ask them to join the program.
Due to reasons I don't understand (but probably because we're pretty f**king picky about tire compound), used tires will never get made into another set of tires, but the material is re-purposed for things like playground surfaces, rubber mulch, truck bed liners, traffic cone bases and athletic tracks.
We've partnered with the lovely folks over the road at SMD who've graciously agreed to work with us on this.
So please come and drop your used tubes and tires off at Chromag (not SMD, we need to bundle them and tidy them up first).
Carl built a lovely crate out front of Chromag HQ you can leave them in. As you can see, he's very proud of it.
If you're not nearby, we'd encourage you to talk to your local bike shop about recycling tires, and point them to tsbc.ca for more info.
Lastly I'd like to say a huge thanks to Karen at TSBC and Jim at SMD for not only letting us drop tires off with him, but being actively keen on the program.
