At American Tire, we decided that we wanted to take on the needs
of the replacement tire business to reduce our carbon footprint.
As the largest replacement tire distributor in the world,
we felt that we could actually have outsized impact by being a leader.
240 to 250 million used tires
come off of vehicles in America every year.
Somewhere, those tires have to be disposed of.
What we discovered was many of them were being burned in kilns, used as used tires
in a secondary market, or in fact, cut and then buried in landfills.
Our trucks go out full,
they come back empty.
From that, we got into the idea of scrap tires and actually tire recycling
and then that put us on another path to the journey.
When it came time for us to select someone to help us
accelerate our ability to get at this issue of sustainability,
we selected BCG.
There were a couple of good reasons for us to do that.
We had worked with BCG for a number of years,
they knew our business inside and out,
they knew our sector.
As a result, they knew the nuances of what it would take to have impact
between the manufacturer,
the distributor, and the retailer in a positive and constructive way.
They had already developed tools that we could leverage and use
and then build off of to help us accelerate to a conclusion and be able
to get stuff into the marketplace faster than anybody else could.
That was real, credible outcomes for our industry.
BCG helped a small internal team accelerate the whole buildout of
what's now become a separate
line of business for us under our FLX FWD logistics as a service hub.
Today, with tire recycling, the results that we've seen have been enormous.
By the end of the year, we expect to be in almost every state.
We've sent 65,000 tires to a better recycling outcome.
We've connected CO2 AI to our computing platform
and in addition to the normal metrics
you would get in terms of how effective we are as a business,
now we can actually understand the impact of our operations
and decisions and future decisions on our carbon footprint.
One of the things that became particularly clear for our company
was that sustainability was not only good for the environment,
but it had some real economic benefits to us as a company,
and also a place in differentiating our business versus our competition.
People want to be part of this within ATD. Even outside of ATD,
people want to work with us because of the sustainability work that we are doing.
It's not often that you go to set up a new internal team or a new project team
and you actually have people saying, “Can I be part of that?”
What we've realized is the importance that
this has not only for us and our employees,
but for our broader constituencies out there in the marketplace,
and it has added value to our brand, it has added value to our company,
and it will continue to bring that to life over the years ahead.
It's a plank in who we are as a company, it represents our values,
it's about your culture,
it's about your company,
and it's about its future.